How Does Poetry Translation Educate Poets?

What does the teaching of poetry translation have to do with the teaching of poetry? For me, a poet and prose writer, who only this past year had my first taste of a literary translation workshop, the answer becomes apparent through the practice. When one engages with another language and culture through poetry, one’s skills in expressing one’s own language and culture through poetry become increasingly refined.

In a most basic way, the study of poetry translation brings about a poetic consciousness. One sees, for example, languages in which certain parts of speech do not exist, where cultural specificity must be accurately rendered, where word play and poetic form must be moved, undiminished, from one reality to another. The translator, like a poetry-mechanic, gets an opportunity to look under the hood of a poem and work hands-on with the nuts and bolts that make it run. It is an encounter with poetry which is impossible to experience any other way, and which, once experienced, permeates the humus of one’s own poetic understanding, informing forever after the nature of one’s work.

Madeline Sonik