Translator's Note

I build things. Translation is one kind of building that does not let me cut corners.

When I translate from another language, I cannot pretend I am neutral. My background and my habits in English show up in every choice. The original work pushes back. It shows me what English can do and what it cannot.

I do not treat translation as moving a message from one place to another. To translate, you have to understand how a poem works. Translation means taking responsibility for how the new piece works. In many poems, meaning is not just what the words point to. Meaning is in the making. It is in where the lines break, how tight the language is, what sounds return, how the rhythm lands, where the silence falls, and how the poem first moved through its world. If I keep only the basic point and lose those forces, I have not translated the poem. I have written a paraphrase.

A translation is not the poem again. It is a new work arriving in a new moment. It meets new readers and new pressures. When the world changes, the poem's place in the world changes too. What it can safely say changes. What it asks from a reader changes. So being faithful does not mean making the same thing twice. It means noticing what has changed and letting that change shape what I make.

Intersemiotic translation, translation across mediums, lets the work happen again in a new form. Each version is a new event, but it stays tied to the original by constraints. Making several versions across different mediums can sharpen what the source work was doing, or at least what I hear it doing. Hence, VerseJunkies. One poem, eighteen translation, music, steel, performance, painting, ink.