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1   ANALOGIES FOR TRANSLATION ARE MANY, most of them assuming a definable something on one side of the equation – a fixed original – that might be echoed or shadowed or imitated on the other Poetry, as Robert Frost notoriously said, is what is lost in the translation, but since that view would leave us without any translated poetry and since there seems to be a great deal of it and always has been, and since such translated work has not only been enjoyed as poetry but has actually influenced the poetry of the receiving language and, in some cases, even taken up residence in the shifting caravanserai of its canon, we can only think Frost was wrong   But the nagging feeling persists It is because we know that poetry, and indeed all literary writing, is so deeply invested in the specifics of its original language that its very existence is a product of it A thousand native readers might have a thousand interpretations of a work in the original but their interpretations are likely to overlap as in a Venn diagram That overlap wouldn’t be the definable something we are looking for but it is not nothing   Instead of asking what is lost then, we might begin with the Venn diagram, with what identifiably remains The essential remnants are likely to consist of events A narrative in the simplest sense is one action followed by another A figure goes into a room with a desk he opens a drawer and takes out a gun He walks to the window and looks at the trees He returns to the desk and puts away the gun That simple sequence can’t change without the whole changing In Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ we have an ailing rose threatened by an invisible worm in a thunderstorm at night The worm finds its way to the rose and destroys it with its dark secret love That much is simple Those are the bones of the text   Then comes the flesh Then the organs Then the heart, whatever heart it is, the heart where