What poems or books do you return to?
There’s something about reading poems in translation and poems in the English of another time that gets me generating ideas and making quirky connections. I go back to Neruda, Pessoa, Quasimodo. I like reading the original and translation side by side and thinking about the translator’s choices, limitations, possibilities. I also love rereading the small Folger paperback editions of Shakespeare plays I read long ago, with the glosses and images of obsolete objects on the opposite page—a weapon called a partisan, a tool called a harrow, a game called hoodman-blind. There are so many stories to tell about flounder, basil, Western versus English saddles, the etymology of the word gift. I’ve learned that I can meditate on the names and facts of a story or phenomenon and, when I’m lucky, make something of my own.
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