Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude.… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God.… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
“I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.” — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
