“When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.”
Tip: press → for another quote, C to copy, S to share.
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
