"What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing"
About this Quote
A good translator knows when to shrink his own ego, and Fitzgerald does it with a clean, almost chastened precision. By singling out "myself in particular", he’s not fishing for humility points so much as underlining an unbridgeable gap: the Iliad and Odyssey were not originally literary objects to be privately consumed, but living performances shaped in real time by audience, occasion, and a culture steeped in shared myth. The Homeric performer wasn’t just "rendering" content; he was doing social work, stitching communal memory to entertainment, improvisation to tradition.
Fitzgerald’s intent is a warning against a common modern fantasy: that translation can function like a high-fidelity transfer, as if language were a container you can decant. His subtext is sharper: translators operate downstream of a whole lost ecosystem - voice, rhythm, formula, gesture, and the collective ear that could hear those epithets and repetitions as propulsion rather than redundancy. What looks on the page like ornament was, in the mouth, a technology.
The context matters. Fitzgerald’s career sits in the 20th-century moment when English-language readers increasingly met Homer in paperback, in classrooms, in the solitude of modern reading. By drawing the comparison and rejecting it, he reframes translation as interpretation under constraint, not resurrection. The line is less apology than ethical positioning: respect the distance, then do the work anyway, eyes open about what can’t be carried across.
Fitzgerald’s intent is a warning against a common modern fantasy: that translation can function like a high-fidelity transfer, as if language were a container you can decant. His subtext is sharper: translators operate downstream of a whole lost ecosystem - voice, rhythm, formula, gesture, and the collective ear that could hear those epithets and repetitions as propulsion rather than redundancy. What looks on the page like ornament was, in the mouth, a technology.
The context matters. Fitzgerald’s career sits in the 20th-century moment when English-language readers increasingly met Homer in paperback, in classrooms, in the solitude of modern reading. By drawing the comparison and rejecting it, he reframes translation as interpretation under constraint, not resurrection. The line is less apology than ethical positioning: respect the distance, then do the work anyway, eyes open about what can’t be carried across.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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