About this book

Good translations can be inspired if the translator is imaginative and fluent in both languages, being familiar with the idioms and allusions. This is not usually how we hear each other. Most of us are often bad listeners and bad readers of literature, even indifferent as to whether the translation is inspired or merely literal. Even the best readers, they say, create in their minds a different poem each time they read it. We take from things what we like at the time, and why not?

I have found beautiful and interesting poems written in different languages and times. If you want to understand the originals, they are represented elsewhere by translations that adhere to the originals as closely as possible, which has not been my intention here. Paste them into a translation program and see what you get.

The cover features my drawing of the reverse transcriptase enzyme.

How this book is organized

The contents page is organized alphabetically by the original languages. When I’ve selected more than one poem from a language, I put them in the order that I wrote them.

The book has three pages for each poem. The language codes label the links in the header. For example, for Bulgarian, language code Bg:

  1. En: My poem (in English)
  2. Bg+literal: The original Bulgarian poem, with a literal translation on its right
  3. En+Bg: My poem, with the original Bulgarian poem on its right

Poets

I’ve taken the descriptions of the poets represented in this book largely from wikipedia.

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

Keyboard shortcuts for navigating this book
Context Keys Jump to / Behavior
cover ⌥ ◄ Books by Tom Sharp
⌥ ▲ About Tom Sharp
⌥ ► about this book (this page)
⌥ ▼ contents
⇧ ⌥ ▼ contents
contents ⇧ ⌥ ▲ cover
⌥ ▼ select the next item in the contents
⌥ ▲ select the previous item in the contents
⌥ ► open the selected page
⌥ ⏎ open the selected page
poem ⇧ ⌥ ▲ contents
⌥ ◄ contents
⌥ ▲ open the previous page
⌥ ► open the original + literal translation, translation + original, or translation in rotation
⌥ ▼ open the next page

The poet

Tom Sharp, self portrait

Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).

You may email tom/AT/liztomsharp/DOT/-c-o-m-/ to share comments on this work.

Tom Sharp’s initials