Great Regulars: I've never tasted absinthe, but

I don't think I would like it. It is, of course, unimaginative in the extreme to insist, or expect, that a translator should have anything in common with the writer he is translating (though biographers, for example, have certainly been known to take on the coloration of their subjects, after long study and immersion in the details of their subjects' lives). In any case, a connection between the outlines of my personal life and those of Verlaine's would be irrelevant to a translation: what is relevant is that my work and his might have something in common (see under "Flesh and Spirit," discussed above). As for living vicariously . . . I suppose you are correct that poetry always requires an act of the sympathetic imagination.

from Karl Kirchwey: Princeton University Press blog: Of Flesh and Spirit: Karl Kirchwey on Translating Verlaine

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