The Dead Leave Us Starving With Mouths

I Wanted A Line In A Poem To Be The Hollow Ney Of The Dervish Orchestra Whose Plaintive Wail Is A Call To God. But All I Achieved Was Awkward Shrieking. Not Even The Pure Shriek Of A Reed In The Rain.

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.

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.

Reading A Poem In Translation Is Like Kissing A Woman Through A Veil.

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