Poetry, translation, and projects in progress
Most translation training happens indoors, at a desk, between covers. But the richest classroom in any American city is the block you already walk every day—if you slow down enough to read it twice. Here's a notebook practice for treating storefront signage as a set of live translation prompts.
Every translated poem has at least two constituencies: readers who can check the source and readers who will only ever meet the poem in English. This essay looks at practical ways to serve both without turning the poem into a annotated bilingual edition, using examples from Chinese poetry and a candid look at where the balance tips.
A bilingual poetry book is not two books stapled together. It is a single reading machine, and the gutter, margins, line breaks, and type choices are part of the translation. Here is what book designers and self-publishing poets should get right before the proof stage.
Translating a living poet begins long before the first draft. Here is the conversation I try to have first, including a model letter, the boundaries worth clarifying, and the red flags that can turn trust into a contract negotiation.
A correction email can ruin your week or improve your book. Here is the process I use now: verify fast, thank in public, fix at the right scale, and treat the errata sheet as part of the translation's life, not a stain on it.
Dedications in translated poetry are not decorative. They name the people who made the work possible and quietly tell you what kind of responsibility the translator felt. I read them first, and here is why you might too.
Translated poetry still arrives in US bookstores with the translator half-hidden on the title page. That small omission shapes discovery, shelving, reviews, and the way readers understand who made the English poem. Here is a practical case for putting translators on the cover, spine, and retailer metadata.
A translation night can be warm, social, and welcoming to people who do not speak the source language. This host's checklist covers paired poems, a workable sequence, plain program notes, permissions, audio, and the small moves that keep an event from turning into a lecture.
A tour through six versions of poems that crossed into English and came back changed. Some are errors, some are liberties, and all of them show how US readers inherit poetry through somebody else's choices.
An argument for publishing drafts, variant lines, and abandoned attempts alongside finished poems. Done carefully, an open translation notebook gives US readers a way into the process without stealing anything from the poem.
A personal mixtape of ten first lines from translated poems—not a ranking, not a canon, just the openings that make me reread, recite, and want to try my own hand at the next line.
Earlier this year I split a poem into sixteen cards and sent each line down a different chain of readers. The final composite was not a translation so much as a group portrait—and the mistakes were the most honest part.
Seamless translation is a lovely promise, but it is often a lie of omission. Drawing on Chinese-English poetry, this essay argues that translators' notes, footnotes, and marginalia are creative and ethical parts of the reading experience, not interruptions to be sanded away.
A poem read aloud in two languages is never just two versions of the same text. This guide walks through what breath, pause, pacing, and room sound can teach translators and listeners, with a practical recording checklist and a listener's map for first encounters.
You do not need a second language to use translation as a generative engine. These seven exercises — built for MFA seminars, library writing groups, and one person at a kitchen table — turn a poem you can't read into raw material for poems you can write.
I fed a four-line Tang poem into three translation engines and then spent a week making my own version. The machines were never wrong, exactly — they were just deaf in places I've learned to listen. A craft note on what fluency still costs, and what readers of translated poetry should put their ear to now.