Some Thoughts from Valzhyna Mort, Belarusian Poet, on Translation

First, here's a poem of Valzhyna Mort in Poetry.

She has this to say about translation, which I think is a nice response to many of our questions this semester:

"I believe that a translation should be a new poem. My favorite saying about translation is that poetry translations are like men. When they are beautiful, they are unfaithful. You have to choose do you want beautiful poems or do you want faithful poems. And of course the best if you can merge beautiful and faithful as close, if you can, but if you cannot, it’s better to make it beautiful."

That comes from this interview (a video that includes her readings poems to a woman baking - it's hard to tell who looks more uncomfortable).

And here is another brief interview, which also touches on translation.