Kelen wonders whether poetry can be translated at all. He asks whether every language has ‘this thing we call poetry in English’. This is not to say that other languages do not possess poetry; but giving as an example English and Chinese poetry, Kelen wonders parenthetically whether ‘the thing which gets translated either way as “poetry” [is] really generically the same kind of text’. But he prefers to avoid ‘deep definitional aesthetics when there is fun to be had translating poems’. He is more troubled by the anthology’s organisation along national lines, since poets and poetry have been expelled from Plato’s delimited state, his republic. He supposes that although poems may gesture towards ‘newly imagined worlds’, yet they are composed ‘in the worlds we are given’. He argues that one of a poet’s undertakings is to reveal the truth of where we live. In other words, a poet exposes the republic’s fault lines. Nevertheless, ‘poets are rightly uncomfortable with national, as with for instance genre, boxes’. Rather ‘poetry—like painting—has huge cosmopolitan potential (and great potential as a vehicle for peace)’. We might say that the republic in the hands of the poets becomes porous: open to possibilities of harmonious exchange through translation.

Kelen poses the very real question of ‘why translate the stuff’. Octavio Paz suggests that ‘one of the main reasons for translating is a moral urge, a didactic impulse.’¹ Kelen posits ‘a process reason and a product reason’. Translation as process is ‘good because it is both peace-making and it makes the translator a better poet’, and ‘it is fun because the spirit of poetry and the spirit of cultural crossing have so much in common’. This is translation as possibility of exchange. As for the product reason, Kelen suggests that there is a great quantity of truly ‘excellent poetry being produced in the world today, and in many languages’. Yet only a fraction ‘of the good stuff ever gets translated and one of the reasons for this is that so few people feel that they can do the job’. Hence ‘there is an urgent need to turn poets into translators and translators into poets’. In other words, poets with their language skills are best placed to translate other poets. Kelen envisages ‘that in the case of a team of collaborating poet/translators, at least one of the participants … will be a native speaker’ of the translating language. He does not preclude bilinguals, ‘but there being so few true bilinguals in the world who are also poets, it makes sense to look on … poetry translation as ordinarily collaborative’. He envisages ‘a native speaking poet at either end of the process’ and posits that ‘then the space in between these native speaking poets will be a fertile ground for poetry’s intercultural apprentices’. Earlier he suggests that ‘the community building potential of collaborative poetry translation is something quite magical’. Poetry and translation then are ways to connect to one another, to make and foster peace.

Apart from the practical purpose of making poems in translation, Notes for the Translators is revealing in other ways. The poets’ notes illuminate their relationship to both poetry and translation. There is not one school of poetry or of translation. Kelen notes that the poets ‘wax lyrical (how else?) about translation and poetry, the process of art and many related topics besides’. In the spirit of the possibility of exchange that marks Notes for the Translators, Kelen has ‘allowed poets each their own way of organising their notes’, notes that become ‘an insight into the creative process’. T.S. Eliot has written that ‘the nearest we get to pure literary criticism is the criticism of artists writing about their own art² While the Australian poet Alison Croggon writes that ‘it feels a bit awkward to talk about the meanings of one’s own poem, because it’s not really for me to state’, she offers a thoughtful and provoking look at her poem ‘Ode’, whose ‘rhythm is at once formal and relaxed’. Such observations can elucidate a poet’s aesthetics more broadly. They can also elucidate a particular poem’s genesis and expansion. The New Zealand poet Rangi Faith writes that he composed the poem ‘Naming the Team’ because he had ‘an interest in rugby as a sport, and the exploration of the Antarctic continent by such explorers as Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton and others’. The different notes also reveal what kind of thing the poets think that poetry might be. In relation to his poem ‘Untitled’, Philip Mead speculates that it ‘is one of those that emerges from the idea that poems are occasions, rather than topics or things’.

But the anthology also anticipates problems of translation and hopes to ease a poem’s passing from one language into another. Kelen argues that ‘in making a new poem with the confidence of the original, subtle intuition needs to be exercised’. Australian poet Libby Hart’s counsel in relation to her poem ‘Fire’ – that ‘in many ways the poem … is a simple piece but it holds many layers within its skin’ – signals to a translator complexity beneath the poem’s apparent smoothness. Kelen argues that ‘it should matter to a translator what a poet means to mean in an original text-to-be translated’. Australian poet Ouyang Yu’s Chinese poem is translated into English by Liang Yujing, his former student at Wuhan University, and revised in collaboration. This unmasks translation as a labour whose first efforts must be recuperated in a further intense reach for words and images. Even the title changes from the initial ‘Untitled’ to ‘No Title’. Ouyang Yu writes that translation ‘is a most intriguing process in that the translator/writer, while still alive, can exercise some sort of autonomy in relation to his own work even though it is translated by others’.

Kelen argues that ‘poets want to be translated’. The poets’ accompanying notes suggest a strong desire for proper communion between the poet and their translator. The nature of this communion differs from poet to poet. An experienced translator, the Australian poet Peter Boyle does not insist that the translator of ‘Apologising to unicorns’ duplicate the aural qualities of the original, an impossible thing. He concentrates on the modal quality of the poem: ‘I want the poem to shift as it goes along, to have an edge of humour and eccentricity, so that it remains open to the reader or listener to draw the connections’. Kelen acknowledges the impossibility of transferring a poem whole into another language: ‘Without getting stuck on the ontological horrors of the cross-cultural experience, it will be well to acknowledge that translation is naturally a dialogic and a collaborative process and that if translation seems to be impossible then that is only because the idea of communication more generally can be seen this way’. In his notes to his poem ‘Jervis Bay’, Australian poet Peter Skrzynecki asks that ‘the translator should feel a bond with the bay, just as I have felt, a warm embrace … that is revealed through the permanence of the reflections’. For her part, Chris Mansell, another Australian poet, tells her would-be translator that she has chosen ‘A hand in the mouth’ because ‘it talks about the difficulty of translating existence and experience into language’. Dispossessed of any notion of a simple reiteration of her poem in another’s language, she foresees that ‘the translator will have to take liberties’.

For those who prefer to concentrate on the pedagogical aspects of Notes for the Translators, Kelen provides an account of how he himself came to translation through ‘teaching the reading and writing of poetry’. Teaching creative writing in Macao, he realised that students needed to engage imaginatively with the making of poems in English. The translation of Chinese poetry into English was a way to encourage poetry-writing skills in English. His premise was that producing a good translation involved producing a new poem. If students ‘began with a poem they respected in Chinese … then they had a ready-made model and structure-in-meaning for a poem in English’. Kelen notes that ‘there is a vast archive of extant poetry in Chinese going back two and a half millennia, and a large proportion of this material has never been translated into another language’. For poetry translation scholars, this ‘represents an opportunity to bring these surviving voices to the attention of foreign readers’. But Chinese-speaking poets writing in English have ‘the opportunity to be the first to respond to certain of the ancients, or certain of their works’. And for all of us acquainted with the fact, we have an obligation ‘to offer whatever skills we have to make these arts of the past available in our conversation today’.

Notes for the Translators gives insight into the making of poems and the challenges of translation. It also invites intercultural exchange through the art of poetry and translation.