Some Stones Are So Heavy Only Silence

Though The Contradictions Of War Seem Sudden And Simultaneous, History Stalks Before It Strikes. Something Tolerated Soon Becomes Something Good.

Love Makes You See A Place Differently, Just As You Hold Differently An Object That Belongs To Someone You Love. If You Know One Landscape Well, You Will Look At All Other Landscapes Differently. And If You Learn To Love One Place, Sometimes You Can Also Learn To Love Another.

Once I Was Lost In A Forest. I Was So Afraid. My Blood Pounded In My Chest And I Knew My Heart's Strength Would Soon Be Exhausted. I Saved Myself Without Thinking. I Grasped The Two Syllables Closest To Me, And Replaced My Heartbeat With Your Name.

When My Parents Were Liberated, Four Years Before I Was Born, They Found That The Ordinary World Outside The Camp Had Been Eradicated. There Was No More Simple Meal, No Thing Was Less Than Extraordinary: A Fork, A Mattress, A Clean Shirt, A Book. Not To Mention Such Things That Can Make One Weep: An Orange, Meat And Vegetables, Hot Water. There Was No Ordinariness To Return To, No Refuge From The Blinding Potency Of Things, An Apple Screaming Its Sweet Juice.

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.