Translation is, as Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter, “the art of existing in two languages at once.”

Translation is a practice of empathy, like choosing a twin, where affinity and kinship is a declarative act and not a passive discovery. What would the world be like (I ask naively) if our first impulses were to find that part of us that is most like each person we meet?

When I translate poetry, I have to make the poet whose work I am translating into a character I hope to embody, a character that may not actually exist in English or to English-only readers.

For me, translation means hearing voices—allowing an author’s voice to sing through my own