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.

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.

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.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.