Speech! Speech! | Poetry Magazine

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/74587/speech-speech

On our expedition through the magazine, we wondered whether all poems—whether or not they cross linguistic boundaries—are inherently efforts at translation. In a prose snippet rendered into English by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

My difficulty (in writing poems—and perhaps other people’s difficulty in understanding them) is in the

impossibility of my goal, for example, to use words to express a moan: nnh-nnh-nnh. To express a sound using words, using meanings. So that the only thing left in the ears would be nnh-nnh-nnh.

Tsvetaeva, several of whose poems……..