"Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too"
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Translation is a kind of possessive love: you encounter a line that feels sharper in its native tongue, and suddenly the only tolerable outcome is to make it live in your own. Fitzgerald captures that moment of envy and awe when a foreign sentence lands like a clean blade, and English, usually so roomy and confident, feels briefly insufficient. The impulse isn’t scholarly duty; it’s a craving to relocate an experience. “Since English is yours” is the tell. Language becomes property, identity, homeland. The translator’s desire is intimate and a little imperial: if it moved me over there, it should exist over here, in my house, in my mouth.
The slyness of “for what satisfaction it is hard to say” matters because it refuses the tidy myths translators are often handed: fidelity, service, cultural bridge-building. Fitzgerald suggests the real payoff is less noble and more bodily. “Piercing, living, handsome” names a sensual reaction, not an argument. Translation, then, is the attempt to reproduce not just meaning but the feeling of being struck by meaning.
Contextually, Fitzgerald spent his career making ancient texts newly legible in modern English, most famously Homer. His line reads like a field note from that labor: the knowledge that equivalence is always partial, but also that partial isn’t pointless. You don’t translate because you can fully replace the original; you translate because you can’t stand leaving that particular kind of beauty inaccessible to the language that raised you.
The slyness of “for what satisfaction it is hard to say” matters because it refuses the tidy myths translators are often handed: fidelity, service, cultural bridge-building. Fitzgerald suggests the real payoff is less noble and more bodily. “Piercing, living, handsome” names a sensual reaction, not an argument. Translation, then, is the attempt to reproduce not just meaning but the feeling of being struck by meaning.
Contextually, Fitzgerald spent his career making ancient texts newly legible in modern English, most famously Homer. His line reads like a field note from that labor: the knowledge that equivalence is always partial, but also that partial isn’t pointless. You don’t translate because you can fully replace the original; you translate because you can’t stand leaving that particular kind of beauty inaccessible to the language that raised you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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