Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.
When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.