Marilyn Hacker Quotes

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

My children speak very good Chinese, and they translate for our American friends.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Translations are very important these days, since an average person can only know 2-3 three languages. We have so many languages in India and poems are being written in as many of them.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland.

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

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.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.

Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.

For the benefit of those who are not bilingual, I will now continue in English.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

I was six or seven and an interpreter.

I speak to the Spanish players that we have in Spanish.

I only know English, so I feel like I can be the dopest French rapper ever if I learned French.

I'm bilingual. I speak English and Spanish.

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.