The Shadow Past Is Shaped

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.

The Shadow-past Is Shaped By Everything That Never Happened. Invisible, It Melts The Present Like Rain Through Karst. A Biography Of Longing. It Steers Us Like Magnetism, A Spirit Torque. This Is How One Becomes Undone By A Smell, A Word, A Place, The Photo Of A Mountain Of Shoes. By Love That Closes Its Mouth Before Calling A Name.

No One Is Born Just Once. If You're Lucky, You'll Emerge Again In Someone's Arms; Or Unlucky, Wake When The Long Tail Of Terror Brushes The Inside Of Your Skull.

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