Thank you to Therese Walsh from Writer Unboxed for forwarding this piece over to me!

"Translating poetry opens up new worlds of language," by Carol Rumens for Guardian Unlimited, attempts to answer the hypothetical question posed in the subject line: Is there value in translating poetry?

As Rumens mentions in the article, a perfect replication is never possible, but very interesting "new poems" emerge from the collaborative effort of translation.

For instance, click here to see multiple translations of Matsuo Basho's famous frog haiku. It's very interesting to see how even the smallest set of words can be viewed so differently. And that's beauty of translating poetry.

*****

Check out other Poetry News.