Robert Bringhurst:
Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry (and so is a good deal else). But when words are made from poetry, as when bread is made from wheat, a plate from clay, or a desk and chair from seasoned wood, the substance may or may not be permitted to speak. Poetry can be articulated in words -- but it can just as easily be smothered, wasted, trashed in the very process that might have given it breath.
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[T]ranslators, like others, can spend their lives in a cultural rut. Then, in the name of enlarging our sense of the world, they only reinforce its known size and shape.

In the indoor world of desks and chairs and words -- the goldfish bowl of bookshelves, ink and paper -- translation becomes a profession. Its fundamental task is still the task of every profession: to honor what-is, by articulating the poetry in things. We have of course no assurance that what-is wants our attention, and that's a reason to pay attention cautiously, respectfully -- but not a reason not to pay what's owed. Translators, lawyers, doctors, teachers and engineers, like bakers, potters and carpenters, all have to be poets in their way. When they are not, things are apt to go awry. And they do go awry, because professions become institutions, and institutions close their doors and windows, leaving poetry outside.

That does no harm to poetry, of course; it only harms the institutions. Outside -- meaning outside human management -- is the place where poetry lives: in the mountains, in the forest, in the body, in the mind. The forest is not an institution, though the Forest Service is. An ecology is not an institution. But a fenced and managed forest or body or mind is somewhere on the path from ecological to institutional status.

So why do we meet poetry so often in the guise of managed language? Because that's where we officially permit it to exist. Poetry, like alcohol and sex, is subjected to rules and invested with ritual because of the threat it represents.

- Robert Bringhurst,
from "What is Found in Translation"
in Everywhere Being is Dancing.

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