Voice; Landscape; Violence

Abstract

Back in the good old days, when perhaps I translated poetry more quickly and prose more slowly than I do now, I thought it was absurd to write about the problems of translating any particular poem. For one thing, I am the sort of poet-translator who likes to bear in mind the entire body of work of the poet I am translating. For another, I am the sort who prefers to show only clean sheets to the public, and I do not mean winding sheets. Either the poem lives in my English or I will not publish it. No breast-beating, hair-tearing, garment-rending explanation of lamentable choices can breathe life into a corpus delicti.