The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
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Quotes by Marilyn Hacker
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Marilyn Hacker. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Marilyn Hacker
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.
You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
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