The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

When I hit a block regardless of what I am writing what the subject matter is or what's going on in the plot I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why but it calms me calms my brain.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I believe in God but not as one thing not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

I have an all-Japanese design team and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.