Read "Nocturn" and "That nullity cloaking your shoulders" in issue 10 of Transom: http://www.transomjournal.com/issue10/Issue10.html

. . . along with a brief interview:

Transom:

Is it possible for the original text to be reborn through the translator?

Portnowitz:

The term reborn I think presumes some kind of propriety, that the poem translated would now be my poem, my child, something I generated. I don’t think of it that way. I think of the poem as belonging very much to its original author, in whatever language it ends up in. If a poem is something born by the author, a translator’s job, as I see it, would be more akin to the art of portraiture, to portraying that “child,” not conceiving it over again—the poems sits for you, finicky as any subject, and you try to get it right, to capture its features, its shape, its lineaments . . .