A funny thing happened on the way to Wallace Stevens' later poetry

[rayheinrich]

The site is an excellent find.
I like the young women on the landing page. Very exotic, very French. Someone should write a poem about them.

These days, I prefer reading transliterations to translations. The original word order brings me closer to the intended poem.
Poetry, of course, remains impossible to translate. There have been many threads on this.

Good to see you back, ray (did I say that before?)

Poems are impossible to translate, but it's fun to try anyway cuz the result, even if different,
is a poem. And sometimes it's a half-decent one. And when it isn't, sometimes, the mess you
end up with is amusing. That's one of the things I like about poetry: just reading it makes you
a poet. When you read a poem you're writing one in your own head that's a different one
from the one the writer reads as he's writing it.
        When I read one of my poems I've written years ago, I sometimes wonder
who that person was. He definitely isn't me, the one reading the poem.
I'm often impressed, that person back then was a better poet than I am.
When I write a poem, it doesn't have to be that good (though I'm always trying to write ones I
consider good).
        When I was a kid my dad made furniture for the house. It was sturdy and
functional. I'm sitting at the kitchen table he made many years ago when I was a child.
It's still solid and has worn its years well. There are tens of thousands of cabinet makers
who can make better tables. But this one was made by my dad and there's no table out
there that's as good as this one is to me. That's how I feel about my poetry. All those other
poems, no matter how good they may be considered, are not as good to me as the ones I write.
        Another favorite thing I like to do is read different translations and compare them.
It's always surprising how different they are. I like to get two or three translations and
sort of mush them together to make my own. In the past I would read Emily Dickinson
poems and translate them into my English. As a joke, I sometimes called it newspeak.
Years ago on a poetry board I posted quite a few of my translations of Emily Dickinson.
To some people this was a heretical act. I knew this, I, back then, took great delight in
trolling people I thought were pretentious. Doing translations of poets they respected
particularly bothered them. At some point a few years ago I realized I was being pretentious
when I trolled people I thought were pretentious. So I toned it down quite a lot. Though,
I must admit, I still love doing it from time to time.

And thanks, I really enjoy being back. And I won't tell you if you did it before because
maybe it will make you more likely to forget you did it this time and I can experience
more good vibes.

p.s.
P.S.
I was just thinking about the concept "poems are impossible to translate" we were talking
about. It's hyperbole that's fun to use to emphasize the point that translations are hard.
But a whole lot of the time you can get most of the poem translated so somebody else
reading it gets a good idea of what the original author intended. It just varies widely with
how competent the translator is, how much they know the material, the complexity of the
poem/levels of meaning/subtext, puns, irony, if they're are equivalent idioms, even cliches,
in the two languages, how similar the cultures are, etc. because I'm tired of thinking coming
up with more variables. So you can make it sound as hard as you want. But a whole lot of the
time a half-decent translation is possible and sometimes a lot better and sometimes a lot worse.
Anyway, blah blah blah, I understand second thoughts about calling the translation impossible
when it varies from easy to hard.