My inability to read translations is simply that--a personal defect. It has nothing to do with the poor quality of some translations, although that doesn't help much. Translations simply exclude 80-90 percent of what I care about in the poets that I most care about. The poet's particular feel for language, tone, rhythm, etc... I have had the experience of not recognizing a translation of a text that I know well. I can compare the two texts and find that, yes, the translator has done a good job, but I still stubbornly refuse to recognize, to acknowledge any but the crudest relationship between the two texts.

Take the famous example of Beckett's Ill seen Ill said (Mal vu mal dit). This is a translation by Beckett himself, the author of the French original, into English, but, as Marjorie Perloff shows in a classic essay, Beckett's relationship to the French language is totally distinct from his relationship to the English language. So one of the most fundamental aspects of the text--the writer's relationship to the language itself--is radically different in the two texts. Milosz's American translators I'm sure have done well by him, but I just don't feel any tension in their language. I just can't give myself over to the text.

If you don't feel as hostile to translation as I do you will never be a good translator.