I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

As someone who loves words, I'm fascinated by translation. I'm lucky to have had my work translated

into multiple languages, Korean, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and dozens of others, most of which I can't read. I can read a little Spanish

and the tiniest bit of French, but that's about it. When I see a poem of my own translated,

I have to trust that it says what I think it says. When a foreign edition

of one of my books arrives, I flip through it, marveling at how the words are mine and yet

not mine. I don't have the skills to translate my own work, and translating poetry is an art as well as a skill.

Translators have to think not only about meaning, but about sound, especially with poetry.

The sounds and rhythms of words

can vary greatly from language to language,

so recasting a poem is tricky business.

For example, take the word heart in English,

which in Spanish is Corazon.

The syllable count goes from one to three.

The feeling of the word is different.

The English word is quick and staccato,

with hard sounds and a hard tea to clip the word at the end,

heart.

The Spanish word is more melodic, with a long vowel and a softer closing, chorosone. Swapping one for the other doesn't change the meaning,

but it certainly changes the sound.

I also think that all literature is translation, in a sense.

We are taking what is in our minds and translating that into language, and that's true in any language.

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