Top 37 Quotes by Marilyn Hacker

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

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.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

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.

There is always an element of play in form, however 'serious' the expression.

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.

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.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.