Reading A Poem In Translation Is Like

There's A Moment When Love Makes You Believe In Death For The First Time. You Recognize The One Whose Loss, Even Contemplated, You'll Carry Forever, Like A Sleeping Child. All Grief, Anyone's Grief...is The Weight Of A Sleeping Child.

History Is The Gradual Instant

Translation Is A Kind Of Transubstantiation; One Poem Becomes Another. You Can Choose Your Philosophy Of Translation Just As You Choose How To Live: The Free Adaptation That Sacrifices Detail To Meaning, The Strict Crib That Sacrifices Meaning To Exactitude. The Poet Moves From Life To Language, The Translator Moves From Language To Life; Both, Like The Immigrant, Try To Identify The Invisible, What's Between The Lines, The Mysterious Implications.

The Truth Doesn't Care What We Think Of It.

Even As A Child, Even As My Blood-past Was Drained From Me, I Understood That If I Were Strong Enough To Accept It, I Was Being Offered A Second History.