It has become fashionable to say that poetry is what is lost in translation, and the phrase earns its keep. A poem's music is soldered to its language: the pun that works only in Polish, the rhyme that Russian offers for free and English must buy at ruinous cost. Translators themselves concede the point readily—more readily, in fact, than their critics do. Every translator I have interviewed keeps a private list of lines they consider untranslatable, and speaks of them the way a climber speaks of a face that turned her back. Yet the concession, honestly made, is the beginning of the argument rather than the end of it. If the original's music cannot be carried across, something else can be: the poem's argument with itself, its temperature, its way of paying attention. The translator's real task is not replication but a kind of parallel composition—writing the poem the original poet might have written had she been born into the other language. Judged as copies, translations fail by definition, every one of them. Judged as this stranger art, the best of them succeed at something the original cannot do: they let the poem live twice.