News at Eleven: Geoffrey Brock, editor of the elegantly

conceived FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, begins his "Note on Translation" by turning against Frost's formulation of poetry as what is lost in translation. "The translator's task," says Brock, is "not to prevent that loss but to create an entirely new body of sounds." Translators of poetry "must also be poets," he emphasizes, and translations worth reading cannot be other than "real poems in English." This is a demanding set of criteria, and Brock echoes the generous language of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (who coined the phrase "good enough mother") when he says that translators must be "good enough" poets.

from The Nation: Among the Tufted Canes: Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry

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