When You Put A Tremendous Amount Of

When You Put A Tremendous Amount Of Love Into Your Work, As In Any Relationship, You Can't Know - You Can Only Hope - That What You're Offering Will In Some Way Be Received. You Shape Your Love To Artistic Demands, To The Rigors Of Your Genre. But Still, It's A Labor Of Love, And It's The Nature Of Love That You Must Give It Freely.

Love Makes You See A Place Differently, Just As You Hold Differently An Object That Belongs To Someone You Love. If You Know One Landscape Well, You Will Look At All Other Landscapes Differently. And If You Learn To Love One Place, Sometimes You Can Also Learn To Love Another.

If Love Wants You; If You've Been Melted Down To Stars, You Will Love With Lungs And Gills; With Feathers And Scales; With Warm Blood And Cold.

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.

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.