Great Regulars: A: It's interesting that both the

14th-century Italian and the 20th-century Pole were exiles: Dante unjustly banished from Florence and my friend Czeslaw for much of his life a forbidden figure in Poland. In both cases the imagination is eclectic, syncretic, cosmopolitan, though deeply rooted in one place, one language. Both make one realize that translation, in the root sense of carrying-across, is impossible as an absolute, literal process. On the other hand, both poets carried many things across, between and among different cultures.

from Robert Pinsky: The Southeast Review

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