Observing the process of poetry in another language is not unlike watching someone operate a complex piece of machinery in a restricted space. One wonders how they manage it. There is a recognised comfort zone in apprehending verse written in one's own native language, but to understand work originating outside this zone can be daunting, albeit rewarding.
My own earliest experiences with "other voices" was probably as a schoolboy, through poems from Old English. There is both a strangeness and familiarity that draws one to the verses. Later, when I had the opportunity to offer my own versions of these and other works for publication, it was with the understanding that the inhalation of each breath of my own should be balanced by the exhalation of breath of another poet. That is to say, one offers up a part of one's self to the process in a way that is doubly personal.
That said, poets likely understand the motives for poetry even though they might not entirely understand the technicalities of French, German, Russian, or Spanish, for example, and there is more common ground than not in poems in which the Self is courted or flayed according to the poet's whim.
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