"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other"
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Translation, for Marilyn Hacker, is less a secondary craft than a way of living inside language with the lights on. The phrase "interestingly different" feels intentionally modest, almost evasive: she refuses the heroic mythology of the translator as savior of masterpieces, and instead frames translation as a daily practice of attention. That understatement is doing work. It signals a poet who knows that intimacy with words is built through labor, not epiphany.
The key subtext sits in "the language that I've found myself living in much of the time". Hacker has spent significant stretches of her life outside the U.S., notably in France, and that biographical fact sharpens the line: translation becomes a pragmatic form of belonging when your tongue and your surroundings don't fully match. It's not just about carrying a poem across borders; it's about negotiating your own voice when geography has rearranged your ear.
"I think the two feed each other" is the quiet thesis of a bilingual (or bilingual-adjacent) writer: translation trains the poet's instrument. Rendering someone else's music forces you to inventory the resources of your adopted or surrounding language - its registers, its social textures, its taboos. At the same time, poetry gives translation its nerve: not just accuracy, but pressure, pattern, tone. Hacker is pointing to a feedback loop where translation is a kind of apprenticeship that never ends, and poetry is the test that keeps the apprenticeship honest. The result is a portrait of art as reciprocity rather than hierarchy: no "original" untouched, no "copy" subordinate, just two forms of making that keep each other sharper.
The key subtext sits in "the language that I've found myself living in much of the time". Hacker has spent significant stretches of her life outside the U.S., notably in France, and that biographical fact sharpens the line: translation becomes a pragmatic form of belonging when your tongue and your surroundings don't fully match. It's not just about carrying a poem across borders; it's about negotiating your own voice when geography has rearranged your ear.
"I think the two feed each other" is the quiet thesis of a bilingual (or bilingual-adjacent) writer: translation trains the poet's instrument. Rendering someone else's music forces you to inventory the resources of your adopted or surrounding language - its registers, its social textures, its taboos. At the same time, poetry gives translation its nerve: not just accuracy, but pressure, pattern, tone. Hacker is pointing to a feedback loop where translation is a kind of apprenticeship that never ends, and poetry is the test that keeps the apprenticeship honest. The result is a portrait of art as reciprocity rather than hierarchy: no "original" untouched, no "copy" subordinate, just two forms of making that keep each other sharper.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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