You are known for the linguistic fireworks in your poetry and musical word play. Has translating at all affected the way you use language in your own poetry? Has it made you see your native language any differently, in terms of muscularity, elegance — or any other aspect of language that becomes more pronounced in poetry?

My parents were both professional musicians. Well, my dad was, until he recognized he couldn’t raise a family on a French horn player’s salary, and so he went into business and did quite well. Even so, they often held chamber music evenings in our home, and for a while they had, along with a group of their friends, a box at the Metropolitan Opera, to which I was allowed to go when one or the other of my parents couldn’t attend. I grew up in a home saturated in classical music. For the past ten years, I’ve been learning to play the viola, which is one of the most rewarding and frustrating experiences of my life. As you can see, music is deeply meaningful to me. In fact, in my recent incarnation as a new birder, I’m learning the birds by their songs, as well as their shapes and colorations and habits, so it’s clear I have an aural way of approaching art and nature. Maybe the world.

I now try to wring as much as I possibly can out of the music of the words, and this may well owe its impulse to my adventures in the Turkish language.

As to your first question, I was tempted to say, no, translating hasn’t had much effect on my own language, but it just occurred to me that it just might have done so, in a deeply subconscious way. One of the many great differences between Turkish and English is the fact that Turkish is so much more economical than English. Turks use fewer words more flexibly, and therefore achieve a great economy in their verse. When I was translating from the Old Turkish of Pir Sultan Abdal, who frequently wrote in syllabic form, I tried to faithfully reproduce the form in my English version, but that was a quixotic battle. The information communicated in a single eleven-syllable line in Turkish takes, minimum, fourteen or fifteen syllables to say in English. What this might have to do with the development of my own verse is intriguing to consider, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me if you hadn’t asked the question. The poems I’ve been writing in the past few years have slowly but surely been morphing into pieces with shorter and more muscular lines. I now try to wring as much as I possibly can out of the music of the words, and this may well owe its impulse to my adventures in the Turkish language.

In her keynote address at the 2004 American Literary Translators’ conference, Canadian writer Antonine Maillet described translating as getting inside the head of the original writer to start at the place where the writer began the original text, then writing it all over again in your own language. I love this description because it captures the intimate nature of translating another poet’s work. How have you experienced doing translation work, especially as a Westerner translating Eastern poetry?

Ah. There are so many issues a translator has to consider — it’s a gigantic gestalt that seems able to wriggle just out of conceptual range at virtually every turn. And translating across the East/West divide only complicates matters, deepens the mystery as to how it ever works at all. I’m not at all certain I can place myself inside the head of a sixteenth-century revolutionary Sufi mystic and political rebel, as Pir Sultan Abdal was, but I can certainly inhabit the sonic, emotional, and visual worlds his words created. Once I understand those, I can begin to try to bring them over into English. Time is a great humbler as well — the Anatolian world of 1530 lives at a terribly challenging distance from us.