News at Eleven: In writing Cathay--at a time when,

incidentally, he knew no Chinese--[Ezra] Pound discovered a mysterious process that [Ted] Hughes seems also to have hit upon. Anyone who has successfully translated a poem knows something of it. In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in and which therefore appears to defy the truism we began with.

from Times Literary Supplement: Ted Hughes and translation

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