Try a Little Harder - CAT Center

To be a translator of poetry, at the moment of translation one must be a poet. Robert Lowell writes in the Introduction to Imitations (1981) about translation, “[t]he poetic inspiration must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem.” Cruelly, he also notes that academic versions “seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry…they are by taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds.” Of the many qualities in Lowell’s own poetry, consider how signal to his work were his “Imitations of Villon, Baudelaire, Pasternak, and Montale. The translation of poetry profoundly affects the formation of the poet. My best preparation for writing the 501 sonnets in my book, The Secret Reader, occurred in Argentina during the Dirty War. I came to Argentina as a Fulbright professor to teach at the university, but my writer self came to translate the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges. I lived across the

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