Included in this issue is an essay by Clayton Eshleman on “Translating Cesar Vallejo,” which contains a few interesting observations about the challenges of translation:

The temptation in Kyoto at this time was to tinker with Vallejo’s lines in English in such a way that they made sense to me, to, in effect, interpret them rather than to translate them. Probably because of the wall I was up against, I had a lot of fantasies, not only about what a particular line or image might mean, but fantasies that seemed detached from the translation itself. And since Vallejo was one of my key sources for what being a poet meant, I knew that if I was not careful I would skew the translation in directions that would represent my own, at the time, unclear aspirations in poetry.