Today's post is late because I was off drinking morning coffee out of a beautiful blue and white cup with a friend whom I haven't seen for months, and we had a lovely, lovely time, so the question is: Why don't I drink morning coffee with my friends every week instead of hardly ever?

Among other things, we discussed poetry translation, and now we are thinking of choosing a couple of my poems and experimenting with an English-French translation. To the best of my knowledge, none of my writing has been translated into anything other than Pig Latin, and it would be so interesting to see how a shift into French might change a poem's sonic impact. I am sure I will be very surprised.

Czeslaw Milosz: "First, plain speech in the mother tongue. / Hearing it you should be able to see, / As if in a flash of summer lightning, / Apple trees, a river, the bend of a road."

Vladimir Nabokov: "Better a crude word-for-word translation than the prettiest paraphrase."