Quotes by Marilyn Hacker

About Marilyn Hacker:

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

Marilyn Hacker

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

Marilyn Hacker

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.

Marilyn Hacker

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

Marilyn Hacker

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Marilyn Hacker

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.

Marilyn Hacker

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

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

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

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

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.

Marilyn Hacker

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

Marilyn Hacker

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

Marilyn Hacker

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

Marilyn Hacker

Author Bio

  • NameMarilyn Hacker
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornNovember 27, 1942
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionTranslator; Poet
  • WorksQuark/; Quark/1; Quark/2; Quark/3; Quark/4
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Lambda Literary Award; National Book Award