Category: Translations

reading a poem well entails thinking like a person of faith reading a sacred text—you must assume that every feature of the language is significant and every choice was a deliberate one that could not have been made any better.

I wish you could see what I see. A vast blue port sparkles in the afternoon sun that shines its bright band across the water. The dazzle makes me look left of it toward the bays and inlets and forested hills on the opposite shore. Below my balcony a cliff held together by lush shrubby trees drops steeply away to the esplanade, quiet on this cool May day.

Xe M. Sánchez – Translations From the Asturian and  Four Photographs Peles Oreyes La...

For the reader, a translation should simply lift from the page into her imagination in no way calling attention to how it was made, only how it sits in all its ravishment. If the translation’s beauty is authentic, the poem may sit in her memory as well.

As a poet, my attitude toward beauty is entirely positive.  The beauty of a work of art is earned through enormous effort, skill, and attention on the part of its creator.  A poem can be beautiful on all sorts of levels: the visual, the aural, the intellectual, the emotional, the imaginative.