We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

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

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

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.