When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.