To translate is to worry. Sometimes it’s to worry in the fretful sense, as in am I getting this idiom right? Or am I clocking the myriad nuances, be they intertextual, sonic, cultural, tonal, or otherwise? But it’s also to worry a text the way one worries a loose thread on a sweater—picking at it, fidgeting with it, testing its tensility and tolerance, feeling out how many formal possibilities are in the original and how English might accommodate or approximate them. When I’m not able to put the fretful worrying out of my mind so I can focus on fidgeting with language, I look to translators I revere. Translators like Don Mee Choi, who said, “translation is in a perpetual state of being wrong because it isn’t the original.” I like this statement because it asks me why should translations try to fool the reader that they are (equivalent to) the original? Why should I try to exemplify a Platonic, product-oriented mindset that masks the process and upholds the possibility of a definitive, authoritative, monumental artifact and not, say, the expression of a particular mind or sensibility responding to and influenced by a particular moment?
When Damion Searls says in an interview that “All translators are faithful, but to different things: to whatever they feel is most important to preserve,” and when Madhu Kaza writes in Lines of Flight that “[i]nstead of focusing on whether one thing (a translation) has the likeness of another (the original), we might also consider how one thing becomes another and whether and how it might go on in its scattering and becoming” (15; emphasis added), I see us turning our gaze more and more toward the opportunities translation offers and not, say, to the losses strewn about and bobbing in the wake of its attempts.
None of this is to say that translation should suddenly dispense with an attention to the original text, its myriadness, its bristling multiplicities. No—this is to say instead that there are many species of attention to be lent to a text, and that we need not reward only those that sit within the previous parameters sketched out by market forces and colonial extraction. A species of attention like this Man Ray poem lends to the duration and weight, not necessarily the content, of words. Or the kind of attention Louis and Celia Zukofsky lent to Catullus’s poems, translating them homophonically, in order to communicate not only a kind of oblique sense of the original’s content and message but also the sonic palette and sequencing of the original Latin.
What happens when we think of translation as something that facilitates “a moment in the ongoingness of language [that] will dissolve and disappear and give rise to something else,” (15) as Kaza suggests? Translation as flock, not as taxidermized specimen.
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Sometimes when I’m translating a poem, I hear voices. The voice of the original, the voice of corollary texts in the original language and in English, the voice I’m aiming for in English for the translation. But also voices that are giving me advice, or trying to. On one shoulder, there’s Robert Frost—hoary titan, tightlipped doyen of a modern U.S. idiom, intoning that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”—while on the other is Johannes Göransson, poet, translator, critic, and indispensable thinker on translation. Frost is telling me to watch out—I’m probably going to lose something and isn’t that a shame. Göransson is also telling me to watch out—I’m going to lose something, and in that losing I’m going to gain something, in fact probably multiple things, and isn’t that amazing.
Every translator, every poet, has had their mind echo at some point with Frost’s statement about the relationship of translation and poetry. I have to admit, as a poet at least, that his statement is a nice litmus test for what makes a poem Poetry, because I agree: poems derive so much of their energy and impact from the way they coordinate and disturb the formal flourishes of language, like consonance and rhythm and intertextuality and other things not strictly essential to the content of the message. As Fred Moten says, “Surplus is the very magic of objects, their fetish character, their mysterious secret.”
You can be right about one thing and wrong about another, though. Göransson begins his watershed book, Transgressive Circulation, noting how Frost has set translation up as “poetry’s opposite: inauthentic, mediated, fake, a version, a bad copy, counterfeit.” “To be a translator,” Göransson says, saying the quiet part of Frost’s statement out loud, “is to assume the role of a hoaxer, someone who might be undermining the quality and trustworthiness of literature (and taste).” Is there some defensiveness here? Like, how dare you accuse us, the simultaneous interpreters of the unacknowledged legislators of the world, of such perfidy? Sure. But Göransson doesn’t disagree with Frost that translation can undermine the status quo. In fact, he thinks that this is a good thing, and that we need to lean into this reality of translation. Because with it we can upend capitalistic and parochial notions of publishing, literature, and art.
When I listen to Frost, I get fretful. But when I listen to Göransson and the complement of translators and theorists who sustain me, I feel emboldened. I feel the power my forked tongue has to transform loss into gain.
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There are all sorts of reasons to translate something. When I translate something, it’s often because I love the way it sounds and because I love how the way it sounds is a method for playfully but seriously troubling historical amnesia, linguistic inertia, and (post)colonial and neoimperial hegemony. A poet I’ve been translating for a while now is Jean D’Amérique, a Haitian Francophone poet whose poems are as sharp and economical as seashells. They are intricate and often fueled by a kind of wordplay meant to expand the French language’s ability to reckon with a bloody, ongoing past it facilitated, and so have at their heart a serious playfulness and an ear for music that is as precisely tuned as a Geiger counter.
In D’Amérique’s second book, No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace, he turns a condition—the overlooked, underheeded voice of Black youth—into a formal constraint: the margins are so strict that the text on each page occupies at most two-fifths, and is often swimming in a muting white- or blankness. Sometimes, these margins break words in half. And D’Amérique, brilliantly, was using these breaks as a formal device, allowing a word inside the broken word to swim forth. Not obvious ones, necessarily, but ones you might read or hear and mishear for another word, showing that a breakage does not need to mean a loss of, but instead an increase in meaning.
As a reader and poet, I reveled. As a translator, I balked: How was I going to show the concept, as well as the sound, as well as the meaning of the original word and then the new revealed word within the given space of the margin and hopefully with some sense of the sound play happening as well? The Frost in my head yelled from the nosebleeds: You’re going to lose something.
He was wrong, of course. In a section dedicated to Jacques Stephen Alexis, a Haitian writer disappeared during the despotic reign of Papa Doc Duvalier, we start with these two lines:
An elegy, the section reckons with who, exactly, was killed and who remains in the minds of the speaker, Haiti, and the reader. What has died, the poem says, is the acid in the embrace, the mess or muddle (capharnaum) of scratches. D’Amérique’s brilliance is in how he strands the caphar of capharnaum at the end of the first line and plants in our mind’s ear a cockroach, which the ensuing second line hides once the word is completed. A way of acknowledging a censorious gaze in method, and a way of indicting Duvalier, the Tontons Macoutes, and all the others involved in Alexis’s death, in a mondegreen. Associative, error-fueled, nearly inexhaustible, the mondegreen turns one thing into many. It transforms an instance into a surplus. Definitionally speaking, it is a mishearing of a phrase or line that produces a new, semantically different but rhythmically and sonically similar phrase or line. It is also an example of (accidental) intralingual translation.
To approximate D’Amérique’s playful, gravely serious punning, I chose anthology, and broke the line such that ant ends the first line. You can see what is, glancingly, retained—the insectile, the sense of a gathering together, a collection of sorts—and you can see how it’s not quite right—ants are more benign in the imaginary; anthologies are tidier. That isn’t quite what I’m translating though. The unit of translation here is the break, and the break that creates, which doesn’t break.
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Another poem of D’Amérique’s, from his third book, Atelier du silence, showcases the efficacy of mondegreens as both method and orientation. It’s titled “langue maternelle” (mother tongue), and goes as follows:
There’s so much I love and admire about this poem’s economy, its emotional impact, its incredibly fine-grained attention to how “m” and “l” and “r” sounds are being shuffled across the poem. What I want to look at, though, is the final line. The poem itself contends with the loss of a mother (line one is, roughly, “mother embraces/kisses death”) and what that means for the language the speaker inherited from her. Now that she’s embraced/kissed death, death becomes the mother tongue. It is a physical fact, an organ, a thing inside the body that helps the body make what’s internal external. All feelings are articulated by and through that fact.
The poem’s final stanza expands the scope to include “some children” who have spent their whole lives looking for their mother, the mother tongue, in “the academy of sour milk.” The thing is, if I were to say “sour milk,” I would lose the excellent pun D’Amérique has pulled off with “amer,” which sounds glancingly like “à mère,” or “belonging to mother/mother’s.” Here, he shows the way the new mother tongue tastes things—as mother’s, as sour and/or bitter, simultaneously.
My version of the last line is “in the academy of clabbered milk.” This retains some of the assonant and consonant sonic play (the “m” and “r” and “l” sounds, the repeated short “a” sounds), an important part of the poem’s semantic surplus, and one which suggests at the phonemic level the reconfiguration of atoms and molecules that the mondegreen of mother-in-bitterness suggests as well. Clabbered milk, though, lacks the misheard suggestion of “mother” the original so precisely evokes. Instead, it amplifies the sourness—clabber being a kind of thin yogurt—and brings in, mishearingly, a suggestion of violence, via “clobbered” or beaten or hit hard. It subtracts and it adds. It tries to balance, with different objects, so a similar weight is presented and transferred, but not lost.
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Frost is not wrong that translation poses a sort of threat to poetry. And, when performed cavalierly (see Mona Kareem), or as a ploy (see the “translations” of Ossian, Bilitis, Araki Yasusada) or in service of malevolent powers (see La Malinche), translation can do real damage: to poems, poets, literary traditions, and whole peoples. But translation, like a martial art or smithing, is a practice that can be used in all manner of ways—to defend or aggress, to forge a shovel or a sword or a caltrop.
The threat that translation should pose is the kind good comedy poses—it punches up, not laterally or downwards. Translation should disturb. It should alarm. It is essential, in fact, that it distress, especially the powers that keep trying to tell us a text is fixed, a language is stable, a nation is a bordered area only some are allowed into based on inflexible words and laws and ideas. When you translate something, you are putting into practice the belief that words and ideas can and should transcend as many boundaries as can be imagined (e.g., time, space, national identity, language, race, gender). Frost—bless his heart—meant well when he was talking about poetry, but it is through the threat of loss the hegemon cows us into the safety of convention and away from new ways of thinking and being and doing. Translation is not an experience of loss—it is an expansion. It is a practice that believes in the need for surplus—of meaning, of versions, of attention, and of the kind of readers willing to lend it. So the next time you hear Frost in your ear whispering that you’re about to lose something in your translation, flick your forked translator’s tongue and tell him that “poetry is what grows moss in stagnation.” Your work is the work of a bird depositing a seed that will root and bloom far away from its origin, where it may seem strange and out-of-place, but will still nourish those who try it.
Conor Bracken is a poet and translator. His latest translations are of Jean D’Amérique’s Workshop of Silence (Vanderbilt, 2025) and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s The Burial and Other Short Prose (UVA, 2026). His second book of poems, All-American Dad, is due out from Bridwell in 2026. Recent work can be found in American Poetry Review, AzonaL, Cincinnati Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, Coma, Copper Nickel, mercury firs, Sixth Finch, and On the Seawall. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
This essay is part of our “Staging Style” series. This quarterly craft series, edited by NER‘s Leslie Sainz, presents innovative writers, translators, and critics articulating the influences and impulses that have sharpened their thinking and writing minds.