This is a true story. One of overwhelming joy, but it starts in East Berlin under the socialist dictatorship, where Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings) was a book of legend.

All books printed in the West were illegal, so politically adventurous people like my parents who had some would lend them to each other, and sometimes not get them back, like if the borrower had been arrested. But Der Herr der Ringe was so special that the owner of the only copy in the city refused to take that risk, so he declared that anyone who wanted to read it had to do so at his home.

My mom did that. My siblings and I were already familar with Der Hobbit – we illegally owned a copy and we were all fast readers. My mom told us how this follow-up book was much more exciting. She couldn’t read it to us. So she told it to us, like a fairytale, when we had several hours, like during a long journey on East Germany’s decrepit trains.

In the summer of 1990, East Germany was obviously collapsing, and for fourth graders like me, much of the importance of that was that from fifth grade, we would not be forced to learn Russian but got a choice that included English as an option. English class was great. Everyone loved it, including the teacher. She was a very capable teacher, spoke many languages and had previously taught Russian to fifth graders, before our year when approximately nobody chose that. I think she loved our unfamiliar enthusiasm and the much better teaching materials. At roughly the same time, my mom, doing political things in not yet reunified West Germany, was gifted a copy of Der Herr der Ringe. I read all of it at a speed few would expect from a fifth grader, so my younger siblings could get to it after me. I kept reading it again and again, counting proudly; I recall having read it ten times when a few years later, we got a copy of The Lord of the Rings. Here’s a language learning tip: in the language you’re acquiring, read a book you love so much and have read so often you know it by heart.

but the point of this story is: I was unprepared for how toweringly much better the poems were in the original. I cried so hard… at the sheer beauty of things that I had thought I understood before.

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew…

Of course I told my mom. She explained to me that poetry translation is the hardest kind of translation because you have to get right not just the story but also the rhymes and the rhythm. That’s an impactful thing to say to a boy who is thinking about translation all the time because he’s reading his favourite book in a new language.

I’ve been translating poetry a lot lately, because I’m very sick and the only advantage of that is that it gives me spare time. But it’s all my own poetry, English to German, so I don’t think about the process. Recently I got to translate another poem I love from German to English, that was sufficiently unfamiliar to think about, and that’s when I remembered this history of why I love poetry translation so very much.