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the only way to learn about
writing. What is the closest
reading you can give a
poem Translation, of course.
Translation made me discover
not only the depth of the
poem and the difficulties of
the original language but also
the complexities, difficulties,
limits, and resources of the
so-called “target” language,
the one you translate into. For
a young poet translation can
thus be an incredible learning
experience in terms of poetics:
how does the great poet I am
translating do the job—how
does she put the words of her
poem together—and thus,
what can I learn from this act
The first thing one
learns from such attention
is something about the
constructedness of a poem,
something that Stéphane
Mallarmé and William Carlos
Williams insisted on, namely
that a poem is a machine made
of words, and that when using
a different set of construction
elements—words in a different
language—we are likely to get
a different object. And if we
kick that realization up one
level of abstraction, we realize
that there is no “natural”
language, that no words fit the
things in the world perfectly,
that no language adheres to the
world unambiguously, without
remainder, that between word
and world there is always
slippage—enough slippage to
make thousands of languages
My Recommendations
The Odyssey by Homer, translated
from the Ancient Greek by
Charles Stein.
Finally a translation (semantically
accurate and orally—it was an
oral epic, after all!—exciting)
that arises from a very
acute and accurate sense of
contemporary American poetics
and not from an academic
estimation of what Homer may
have or should have sounded like.
The Complete Poetry by César
Vallejo, translated from the
Spanish by Clayton Eshleman.
Eshleman has consistently been
our best Vallejo translator, the
only one to have spent a lifetime
working and reworking maybe the
most complex oeuvre of 20thcentury
Latin-American poetry.
A Passenger from the West by
Nabile Farès, translated from the
French by Peter Thompson.
Full disclosure: I was asked to
write the introduction to this
book by the great Algerian
novelist/poet, which I did
with great pleasure given the
excellence and intelligence of the
work and the translation.
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
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