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

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

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

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect.

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.

I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.