Q&A …

… Interview with Ilya Kaminsky | The Hopkins Review | Johns Hopkins University. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)

Do you believe you have a soul? Can you tell me where in your body it is? Well, translation is the art form that thrives on that kind of certainty/uncertainty.

Translation is necessary: without it, in English, we wouldn’t have the Bible, we wouldn’t have Homer, we wouldn’t have Dante. Or, in Russian: we wouldn’t have Shakespeare, Milton, and so forth.

It’s a necessary art.

But it is also impossible. Which is why every single year we get another Dante, or two or three Dantes, published.

It is an ongoing conversation, it is an attempt to summon the spirits via our very primitive tools, so to speak.