Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.