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

Every weekday, we spend time on this show expressing gratitude for poets.

We are grateful for their insights, their language, their craft.

We are grateful for the enormous spaces that even the briefest poems create for us and in us.

Poems are deceptive in that way, aren't they?

It reminds me of Mary Poppins' famous carpet bag.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out things that couldn't possibly

fit inside, a coat stand, a floor lamp, and much, much more. Poems are like that too. I'm so grateful

for how vast they are, even if they are only a handful of lines

long. But I want to spend some time today expressing gratitude for translators. They make it possible

for us to read the work of poets

who write in languages we don't understand,

opening doors for us that would have otherwise stayed closed.

They enlarge our lives.

Sometimes creative constraints lead to what feels like greater freedom.

We explore the full capacity within those constraints, finding new nooks and crannies of possibility.

They can seem exponential.

Poetry and translation is perhaps one of the best examples of this.

The difficult, constrained choices of translators lead to surprisingly beautiful things.

Every once in a while, a poem comes along with imagery so startling, phrasing, so original.

I have to read it several times in a row to be sure I'm taking it all in.

Today's poem is one of them.

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