Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

The line is a small masterclass in the Fitzgeraldian art of sounding modest while smuggling in a thesis about craft. He opens with a shrug - "Well, maybe so" - a conversational deflation that resists the grander myth of the naturally "gifted" linguist. Then he pivots: he is not only ungifted, he is "slow". The oddness he flags ("oddly enough") is the point: what looks like a deficit becomes the engine of his skill.

For an author and translator best known for rendering Homer into a lucid, contemporary English, that reversal lands with particular force. Translation is often romanticized as intuition: a kind of bilingual magic trick. Fitzgerald instead frames it as the product of friction. Being slow at languages can mean you can't coast on vibes; you have to account for every hinge and nuance, worry a sentence until it yields its structure. Slowness turns language from background instrument into object of attention.

There's also a quiet polemic here against status and performance. "Gifted" is a label that flatters the speaker and intimidates the audience; "slow" is democratizing, almost comic. Fitzgerald gives permission to readers and writers to treat competence as earned rather than bestowed. The subtext is that carefulness is not secondary to brilliance; it is brilliance in its most reliable form. In a field where translation is judged as either faithful or free, he suggests a third category: patient enough to hear what the original is actually doing, then rebuild it without pretending it arrived fully formed in your head.