Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

“Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us” is the kind of line that pretends to be casual while smuggling in a full aesthetic manifesto. Fitzgerald, best known as a translator who made ancient texts feel startlingly present, is reaching for an almost tactile idea of literature: words as breath, not museum glass. The phrasing does the work. “Yes” opens like an answer to an ongoing conversation, implying community and immediacy rather than pronouncement. “Living voices” makes language bodily and social; it’s not just meaning on a page but people speaking across time. Then he doubles down: “in a living language.” That second “living” isn’t redundant, it’s defensive. He’s anticipating the suspicion that inherited forms (classics, scripture, epic) are inevitably dead artifacts, and pushing back with insistence.

The quiet masterstroke is the last clause: “so it seemed to us.” Fitzgerald refuses the authoritarian claim that he has resurrected the past definitively. He frames liveliness as perception, a shared illusion, even a temporary enchantment. That humility is strategic: it flatters the reader into participation. If the voices live, it’s because “we” can still hear them.

Contextually, it reads like a translator’s credo and a subtle rebuke to pedantry. Fidelity, for Fitzgerald, isn’t merely accuracy to the source; it’s fidelity to the experience of being addressed. The line argues that the highest standard for a text isn’t correctness, but whether it can still sound like someone talking to you now.