Selected Poems: Bilingual Edition

Plot

If these translations are not always faithful to literal meanings of the original, I is precisely because I want them faithful to Alterman's essence, which, I believe, resides in his music, in his evocation of a world through his masterly manipulations of rhthm and rhyme, his intricate interweaving of consonants and vowels. Whenever I had to sacrifice something (and to translate a poem something must always be sacrificed). I preffered to chang a word or an image, to drop a phrase or add a phrase, rather than to depart from his music. I have wanted to create good Alterman poems in English. Robert Friend