*Originally Published in the September 2023 Newsletter* What’s the goal of translating poetry? Should the translator strive to create a new work of poetry that effectively transmits into a new language and culture the experience of the poem that a native speaker would have had? Or should they, as literally as possible, transmit the meaning and/or the literary techniques employed by the poet? Translators embrace approaches that span this diversity of approaches. In one memorable example, Louis and Celia Zukofsky translated the Roman poet Catullus in an idiosyncratic manner focused as much on the sound of the Latin words as on the poet’s ethos. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter is a translation of Sappho that makes the fragmentary nature of the text exceptionally present for the modern reader, never fooling us into thinking we know more of Sappho’s intent than we do. Ellen Bryant Voigt incorporates two translations of Horace within a book of poems that shows the influence of numerous other great poets of the tradition (troubadours, Dante, Yeats…). She transparently demonstrates that her goal is to create a new poem evoking the meaning of the original but not its poetics. Both translations are of poems that have been translated many times before. In form, Voigt chooses to render Horace’s Ode 1.34 (previously adapted, among other versions, by Seamus Heaney in his September 11th poem “Anything Can Happen”) in six three-line stanzas, where the original had featured four four-line stanzas. Her rhythms are evocative of ancient lyric meters without actually echoing them; the harsh sounds of the final lines of the poem in the Latin are filed away in her English, muting Horace’s depiction of Fortune as some sort of Harpy. This form of acculturation through translation can be essential when the original contents of a text are too different for a modern reader to comprehend without deep study. In the other text she translates, Horace’s Ode 1.37, Voigt’s approach allows the reader to identify with the Roman’s joy at the death of the enemy ruler Cleopatra without recoiling from the visceral hatred embodied in the Latin. Horace’s words drip with disgusted condemnation of the female Egyptian ruler, fueled by religious scruples and male chauvinism. Beyond “vile brood of advisors,” none of that rhetoric really comes through in Voigt’s translation, and it is much the better for it in terms of its ability to engage the modern reader. One ends up much more willing to cheer against Cleopatra. These two are only a small fraction of the poems in the collection, but the overarching ethos – to take the bones of the tradition and fashion something new – continues throughout. “The Others” uses the visual imagery of the Sistine Chapel ceiling to consider the lives of children lost to miscarriage. Section 2 of “The Art of Distance” inverts the tropes of Horatian and Juvenalian dinner-party satire to illuminate the tough and rural character of the poet’s father through a botched turtle soup. Read it all – you won’t regret it.