CHICAGO POETRY PROJECT | SEASON SEVEN 2007-08 IN TRANSLATION Curated by John Tipton
		The translation of poetry poses a famously difficult problem. The task demands, beyond attention to the qualities that make poetry vibrant, a rare form of temerity. Clearly, it’s a public service to make work available to a wider audience than that of the home tongue. But it’s also, essentially, an act of exegesis. Translations of Scripture, for instance, have always served both to bring the Gospels to life in another language and to interpret it for the people who speak it. Translators of poetry therefore continually address the crass, unfashionable question: What does it mean? Consequently, translation is often a work of scholarship and, at times, an act of devotion. Translators are invariably the closest readers. Over the next year, we’ve asked six close readers—each of whom is also a poet—to read in the Chicago Poetry Project 2007-08 series: Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop; Cole Swensen; Stanley Lombardo; Forrest Gander; and Matthew Zapruder. They will be reading versions in English of work that originated in various tongues, directing attention to poetry both canonical and obscure and to the writers who created it. But I know from experience that the close reading and rumination required of translation leave a tangible stamp on the translator’s own writing. With that in mind, we’ve also asked these poets to read work of their own that bears the marks of their work as translators. Poetry is what gets lost in translation, Robert Frost tells us. Eliot Weinberger has written “poetry is that which is worth translating.” I believe both are right. This is a problem. Home | Season Seven