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Earlier this year I split a poem into sixteen cards and sent each line down a different chain of readers. The final composite was not a translation so much as a group portrait—and the mistakes were the most honest part.
Seamless translation is a lovely promise, but it is often a lie of omission. Drawing on Chinese-English poetry, this essay argues that translators' notes, footnotes, and marginalia are creative and ethical parts of the reading experience, not interruptions to be sanded away.
I fed a four-line Tang poem into three translation engines and then spent a week making my own version. The machines were never wrong, exactly — they were just deaf in places I've learned to listen. A craft note on what fluency still costs, and what readers of translated poetry should put their ear to now.