Why is it that a poem such as this, composed in a language I don’t know and translated into mine — losing what and gaining what, I can’t pretend to say — … why is it that this speaks so much more powerfully than the hundreds of American poems I’ve read this summer? (Their considerable brilliance has struck me as being like sunlight dazzling off the surface of a swimming pool: surface flashes, sparkling words on vacation.) It can’t be this poem’s artistry, which I can experience only through the translator’s screen; it can’t be some personal resonance in the…Read More