One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.
Christian WimanMandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
Christian WimanI think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
Christian Wiman