Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast.

Listen, some of you may know there is a television program called Gillette soccer Saturday and the reason it exists is because in normal circumstances it's not possible to show

every Premier League football game live on television.

So what you let soccer Saturday offers us

is a bunch of ex-footballers watching the games that we are not allowed to watch on their lovely monitors and we can

see them seeing them and they then tell us what's going on. I think the former is

taken from the old traditional

scam of the kid of a tree or on a fence

illegally watching a football game that he had no intention of paying an

entrance fee to see and then shouting down to his friends below what's going on. So you are dependent either on that

ex-football or on that kid to interpret the action for you. Now I think is probably experiencing both of these phenomenon in my time

which has led to a situation where I never read poetry in translation

because I don't want someone halfway up the tree

telling me what the poet is saying. Poems that there's such an intricate, such

a nuanced, borderline mystical form of communication that I've always felt that a translator can only give

at best the sort of general meaning of the poem, but the expression of that meaning, which is so important when you read a poem is

is uncapturable. However I discovered a Polish poet called Tadaush Dobrowski and the only reason I discovered him is because

he was translated by a woman called Antonia Lloyd Jones and I read an essay by her talking about translating Daubrovsky and she said

that she translated two of his poems for the Polish Book Institute

and was then contacted by Dobrovsky asking her to translate some more.

And she said, and I quote I was surprised considering I had missed a pun that

was crucial to one of the poems I had forced into English for the Institute and I want to

...