Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Translation, in Marilyn Hacker's telling, is less a courteous act of ferrying meaning across a river than a close reading conducted under pressure. Her phrase "obliged to look" makes it sound like duty, not hobby: the translator is accountable to structure, not just sense. And she picks her battlefield carefully. Poetry, "in particular", is where language stops being a transparent vehicle and starts behaving like engineered material - weight-bearing, resonant, sometimes deliberately unstable.

The keystone is her "triple tension": line of verse, syntax, sentence. Those are three different systems for organizing thought, and in good poetry they rarely align neatly. The line break can contradict the grammar; the syntax can delay what the sentence wants to resolve; the sentence can surge past the line as if it refuses to be contained. Hacker is pointing to the subtextual drama that readers feel even when they can't name it: pace, suspense, surprise, the tiny torque of ambiguity. A translation that preserves only dictionary meaning but flattens that tension is, in effect, an adaptation of content with the music stripped out.

Context matters here because Hacker is a formalist who also moves across languages and traditions; she knows that technique carries ideology. How a poet "puts together" language signals class, era, intimacy, defiance. Her insistence on attending to construction is a quiet rebuke to the idea that translation is primarily about equivalence. It's about recreating pressures: making the new language strain in comparable ways, so the reader encounters not just what was said, but how the saying thinks.