Translation is a marriage of cultures. If the translation is marvelous, one flies from Seattle or Dublin to Rome, deplanes and finds that the airport has vanished. Chariots rush through the streets. The freshly built shrines of the pagan gods present marbly bows before togaed crowds. A flimsy fellow steps forward, his eyes aflame with brutal magic. He introduces himself, familiarly, as Catullus, and at once begins to pour out, in phrases both regal and intimate, the most frightening secrets of his love life. So masterful and enchanting is his delivery that one does not notice, until whole minutes have passed, that he is doing this in perfectly fluent modern English.

Or one flies to nineteenth- century Moscow, and visits Anna Karenina. One finds that while she speaks Russian to everyone else, she speaks an effortless English to one personally. So do others in her life. The translation is perfect because it has eliminated all sense of translation. It is not the language that is translated but the reader. One feels oneself translated into another culture, another era, with a delicious ease, as if reborn a different and foreign person who is yet oneself in one's own country and time. It is precisely this quality of sublime transportation that allows one to say afterwards, “Now I can understand why the Romans found Catullus magnificent, or the Russians Pushkin, or the Germans Goethe.”

Daniel Weissbort's excellent little book addresses itself to this problem of translation as transportation, of translation as a marriage of cultures. It does so from a perfectly practical point of view, simply by asking how the marriage may best be arranged. There are no sententious and vapid essays on some newfangled philosophy of translation, no amateurish mumblings about what can and possibly should get lost as the poetry of one language slips into another. Instead we get 19 illuminating articles and exchanges of letters by practicing contemporary translators of poetry. Most of the translators are American, though Weissbort wisely includes a healthy sprinkling of British and Europeanborn contributors as well. Most are professionals, a commodious designation, but one indicating at a minimum that they are published poets in their own right and that they know and have deeply studied the other languages and cultures from which they work.