Here's what Elif Batuman has to say in her brilliant book "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian books and the people who read them". The picture of this excellent read up at the top is its rather wacky ...and unrepresentative ... cover ... my copy has the rather boring cover shown below .. plus the same cover on the back, upside down and in yellow. Pam ?
" What I used to enjoy in poetry was precisely the feeling of only half understanding - a feeling that is intensified, as Tolstoy once observed, when the poetry is written in a foreign language :
"without entering into the meaning of each phrase you continue to read and, from the few words that are comprehensible to you, a completely different meaning arises in your mind - unclear, cloudy, and not in accord with the original phrasing , but all the more beautiful and poetic. For a long time, the Caucasus was for me this poem in a foreign language; once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented .... "
AND .. last time I "borrowed " a poem and typed it on the blog ( well, the previous one actually, the " blog that mysteriously disappeared" ... a sort of precursor to this rather sothach-eque one ) I got a nasty threatening e-mail from the lawyers so I had to unpost it sharpish. Briwsion !
So that put me off a bit ... I suppose there must be a "copyright search engine" that crwydro's around the net poetry-spotting.
Strangely, the second Welsh book I ever got ( found in a posh bookshop in York) was Menna Elfyn's "Cusan Dyn Dall" ... at least the title's a doddle. I knew hardly any Welsh then and was utterly and totally zonked by its strangeness ... this I thought, is a serious business !
It's set out bilingually, and amazingly, the English translations weren't done by her, they were farmed out to a set of no doubt willing folk including Tony Conran and Gillian Clarke ... briwsion again.
I have also got, and totally recommend, "The Adulterer's Tongue" which does the whole thing the other way round ... six poets, one translator !
Anyway, enough for now ... I'll leave you with a fine Colorama song, Dere Mewn, and a bonus extra surprise ...