After reading the very cool translations of the Akira Tatehata poems, courtesy of Shin Yu, as well as the Ilya Berstein translations (see below), I got to wondering why nobody seems to be translating anything these days. Well, OK, by 'nobody' I mean nobody from the writers I find myself hanging out with, in this little "scene" of Boston poetry. I'm sure we can't all be monoglots. Does that mean we really are as provincial as some might accuse us of being? You'd think with all of this blogging that more cross-cultural or cross-linguistic ties could be made. I propose a project to all you fellow poetry bloggers of somehow locating a poetry blogger another country and doing a translation with them (it doesn't have to bee good, necessarily), with all of the translation engines out there, it shouldn't be so hard. OK, well maybe it's a little harder than I'm imagining, but it shouldn't be too hard.

There's also the vehicle of the blog itself. So if anybody out there is reading this and is a non-English speaking poet, let's get to work...