Preface

Summary

When Ralph Pite and Deryn Rees-Jones invited me to write this book for their series, I was concluding a lengthy period of translating work, which resulted in the publication of The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton University Press, 2007). Both of these volumes were produced with the operative assumption that it was the aim in translating poetry to be faithfully accurate and to make translations that read well as poems in their own right. This dual aim was alluded to in the prefatory matter to both books and its implications were sketched in the Translator's Preface to the second. Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible is ancillary to this work in attempting to lay bare (within the allotted space) interrelated ideas and principles about, critical responses to, and reflections on translating, that lie behind the apparently simple aim expressed and, to the best of my abilities, carried out in those collections of translated poetry – as they also were in L'attaccapanni e altre poesie, a collection of my own poems rendered into Italian in collaboration with my wife and published by Moretti & Vitali in 2004.

The first of these ideas is the all-but-universal assumption, most memorably voiced by Robert Frost, that poetry is what is lost in translation. One point of my subtitle is to underline that there is no point arguing against this near cliché in its own terms.