Marilyn Hacker

“Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another.”

“There's an implicit pact between reader and writer in a poem, a pact that the writer will be as honest as she can be, and that the reader will bring his whole life to the poem.”

“Love is a country, with closed borders. Once you are in, you are in. Once you are out, you are out.”

“A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”

“History is a pageant, a procession of figures past. But it is also a text, which we can read, and which we must.”

“The body is a country I will never leave.”

“Language is the only homeland.”

“To write is to name, to give a shape to the shapeless.”

“Pain is a place. Not a visitor.”

“I think poetry is a way of talking about things that are not easily talked about.”

“The past is not a foreign country. We live in it.”

“The city redefined the idea of home. Home was not a place where you were born. It was a place where you became yourself.”

“We are all immigrants in a landscape our children will own.”