Virgil leads Dante through Hell. Which isn’t what happens in Davis’ ‘A translator’s nightmare’.

Dick Davis (Born 1945)

Widely regarded as the leading English translator of Persian Poetry, Davis is also a fine poet, as his Collected poems, ‘Love in Another Language’, demonstrates.

In this poem his fluency with rhyming couplets allows the humour of the nightmare to swing. And the humour doesn’t hide the serious point that’s being made, that no matter how good the translator, there must be times when he or she wonders what would happen if they met up with their source in the hereafter.

And then, what about the poets you didn’t translate? What will you say to them?