I first attempted translation while supervising an enormous study hall of one hundred high schoolers during COVID. I sat at the front of the cafeteria with a notebook, multiple French dictionaries, and a copy of Tania Langlais’s Pendant que Perceval tombait as I doggedly read through each poem. The kids were seated in long rows, the period was lengthy, and most kids didn’t have enough to do. It was bleak, I resented it, and because of the size of the study hall and student hostility about masks, I ran the study hall rigidly. My first foray into translation reflects the mood of that time and there was a sad inflexibility to the whole process.
Translation came to me in a roundabout way. During the first spring of the pandemic, when life seemed fragile and precarious, I returned to school for an MFA at age fifty. My school superintendent, who didn’t know what an MFA was, agreed to add the credits to my teacher salary if I undertook the translation component. At the time, I thought translation would provide a respite from my own work, safe and sure-footing in contrast to the emotional material of my own poems. Instead it awakened an old struggle of self-doubt. I liked writing because it was safe and solitary. Translation meant I could ruin another person’s work.