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

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

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.

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?