Richard Howard

“What you have to do is find a way to be yourself. To be who you are and not who you think you should be.”

“The task of the translator is to make what is foreign, familiar.”

“For me, the poem is a way of writing about what I don’t know.”

“I believe in the art of translation as a substitute for the authority of the original.”

“All my poems are monologues, but they're not all dramatic.”

“I’ve always been interested in the way that history and the lives of people get turned into art.”

“A translation is a performance.”

“I think that criticism is a very creative act.”

“The only reward for the poet is the poem.”