Quotes by Marilyn Hacker
I do have a degree in French literature, though living a language and writing term papers in it are different experiences!
I first encountered Venus Khoury-Ghata's work in an anthology on which I was asked to write a reader's report in 1998. Her poems fascinated me, and I sought out more, translated one.
Roubaud writes sonnets that sound like John Donne in French - something that you read with the same kind of shock and rightness and wit that you feel when you read John Donne, of a little knife going in.
I consciously wanted to be the editor of a literary magazine, which I was on several occasions, most notably at the Kenyon Review from 1990-1994, and which is perhaps related to teaching.
I've always had a penchant for the crown of sonnets, where one sonnet leads to another sonnet and then another, as in John Donne's The Corona.
As an editor, I continually felt honored by the work I was doing. Putting together a journal is essentially compiling an anthology, and inviting the reader to contrast and compare, to consider the way the juxtapositions play off each other.
Praise Voltaire, there are no flags except on municipal buildings!
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.
I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
Various on-line discussion groups are ways to find out about books and writers that one might have remained ignorant of otherwise.
Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
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.
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.
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
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.
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.
Neither Claire nor Venus would, I think, identify herself as a feminist: that word is much more easily accepted in the Anglophone world.
It's rather paradoxical that the major strains of contemporary French poetry move rather far from what I'm doing.
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
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.
I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.
