As for the dual processes of writing and translating, could you elaborate about the remapping they involve?

When time is giving form to a poem — mine or someone else’s — when, syllable by syllable, it becomes a critical part of the poem’s in-formation, the poem provides a complicated kind of pleasure that is also a carrier of wisdom. And at the heart of that sensation is audition — hearing and being heard. …to hear something as complex as another person’s speech, or to truly hear anything, in order for it to impress itself upon you, you have to be silent. (“The narrow mind is the discontented one,” says W.S. Landor in a poem. “There is pleasure in wisdom, there is wisdom in pleasure.”) In order to hear something as complex as another person’s speech, or to truly hear anything, in order for it to impress itself upon you, you have to be silent. That goes for hearing the emergence of a so-called original poem as it begins to take sonic and conceptual shape in your mind, and it also goes for registering the textures and dynamics and emphases of a poem in another language before you begin translating it into your own (which is to say, as you read). You have to know what it is, or wants to be. Not perfectly — which is impossible — but deeply, with its subtle variations of sound and lack of sound, before you can give it new articulation. And much, though not all, of that knowledge comes through a listening and a hearing — which is to say, out of silence.

The fourteenth-century Spanish (and sometimes Hebrew) poet Santob de Carrión put this marvelously in an epigram:

To what extent are your choices — linguistic and with regard to imagery — when translating intuitive?

It’s always a combination of intuition and tradition, information and transformation. Although poets can revise, and I certainly do (extensively), the improvisatory aspect of the whole enterprise is critical for me — both in the composition of my own poems and in my translation of work by others. That moment of initial and ongoing physical contact with the materials of the real, or the imagination, or a foreign poem —which is also a listening — will to a large extent determine the quality of what eventually emerges as the poem in English. And again, this holds for whether we’re talking about original writing or translation. In the end, it’s all a matter of composition — of putting words in a row so that they might do something meaningful and memorable.