Every translator of poetry faces a choice that cannot be evaded, only disguised. A poem means partly through its sense and partly through its sound—its meter, its rhymes, the particular music of its consonants—and no second language offers the same words with the same music attached. To preserve the meaning exactly, the translator must usually surrender the form; to reproduce the rhyme and meter, she must bend the meaning, choosing a near-synonym that happens to chime. There is no third path that keeps both intact, whatever a preface may promise. The honest translator, then, does not claim to have carried the poem across unharmed. She admits she has made a new thing that stands in a defined relation to the old one, and she tells the reader which debts she chose to pay and which she let lapse. What is dishonest is not the loss—loss is guaranteed—but the pretense that nothing was lost, the smooth version that reads as though it had been composed in English from the start and asks no questions of its reader. A translation that hides its own seams flatters us; one that shows them respects us. The best of them, curiously, are often the ones that make us feel most acutely the distance we are being helped, imperfectly, to cross.