'The Second Life of Art'

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in order of frequency, are Dante, Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert. I have much English and American poetry safely stored in memory – one of many reasons I am almost never bored -- but only scraps of the Italians and the Pole. Rough outlines, fragments, incomplete lines, yes. This is shameful, I know. One of the tests of great writing, especially poetry, is memorability. The personal stamp of some poets is so indelible, so poetically DNA-specific, as to lay claim not only to stanzas, lines and phrases but individual words. Perhaps this is the ultimate memorability, to wield a single word so forcefully that readers, centuries later, recognize its ownership. “Slant” immediately conjures Dickinson; “madding,” Gray. “Fruitfulness” and “clammy” are forever Keats’. I'm denied this with the three foreign-language poets cited above. Montale was also a…