The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam

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.

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.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

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

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.