I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.

I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

I 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.