Rain Taxi Summer Edition

The second half of Rain Taxi‘s online Summer Issue is now available.

Included in this issue is an essay by Clayton Eshleman on “Translating Cesar Vallejo,” which contains a few interesting observations about the challenges of translation:

The temptation in Kyoto at this time was to tinker with Vallejo’s lines in English in such a way that they made sense to me, to, in effect, interpret them rather than to translate them. Probably because of the wall I was up against, I had a lot of fantasies, not only about what a particular line or image might mean, but fantasies that seemed detached from the translation itself. And since Vallejo was one of my key sources for what being a poet meant, I knew that if I was not careful I would skew the translation in directions that would represent my own, at the time, unclear aspirations in poetry.