DESPISE YOUR HEART.

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Lavinia Dickinson written c. march 1862

he would be directing the orchestra, I realized, and the premonition in his words appeared before me in all its future splendor, him a young man in a red coat, weaving his music to life. I would be on the ground, staring upward to see my brother at the top of the upside-down tree. I would be a lady with feathers in her wig and no quill in her hand, looking on in silence.

cardan grins at me as though we've been great friends all our lives. i forgot how charming he can be--and how dangerous that is.

“i think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. the poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. that’s why shelley writes that translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible. so the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. the poet runs untrammeled across the meadow. the translator dances in shackles.”