Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that Ive found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other. – Marilyn Hacker
I have experienced healing through other writers poetry, but theres no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, Ill write a bad poem. – Marilyn Hacker
When you translate poetry in particular, youre obliged to look at how the writer with whom youre working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence. – Marilyn Hacker
Everyone thinks theyre going to write one book of poems or one novel. – Marilyn Hacker
My mother was told she couldnt 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. – Marilyn Hacker
You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I dont mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship. – Marilyn Hacker
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down. – Marilyn Hacker
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged. – Marilyn Hacker
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. – Marilyn Hacker
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. – Marilyn Hacker
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. – Marilyn Hacker
