Most poems about translation fret over what gets lost. Steve Benson's "Translations" starts there, then walks out of the room. The speaker admits that reading translated work means imagining "the excited writing of the one author / and its openness," and the parenthesis "(streams, thickets, wrestling dogs)" shows what that imagining looks like. It isn't a theory of the original. It's a handful of wild, physical things. "There is no right translation," he says, only "absurd efforts to make it the same in main respects." The flat, almost bureaucratic phrase "in main respects" is funny because it sounds so small beside those wrestling dogs.
Then the poem lurches into a different voice. "Oh noble boring iconoclast!" is an apostrophe, a sudden shout at someone, and what follows is a stream of orders: go to the country, "chew on miles of hay," turn off the radio, "just eat, open your mouth, eat!" The poem never says who is being addressed. It could be a translator, a reader, or the speaker's own stiff, over-careful self. The insult is neatly built: the person is "noble" and an "iconoclast," yet also "boring," as if all that principled rebellion happens at a desk. The cure is not more thought but appetite. Mouths recur throughout the poem: "open mouthed," "chew," "eat," and finally "throat." Reading is imagined as feeding.
The poem's sound and shape support this. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The long lines read like speech, and the line breaks fall at breathless, unfinished moments: "get / to the country," "among these / people of cities." Each break pushes you on before the sentence can settle. Small sound patterns still surface. "Miles of hay" and "open mouthed" share open vowels, and the later "burbling thickly" is thick with consonants, so the language seems to make the mouthfeel it describes. The city is given its own sensory signature, too: people there "smoke and burn coffee," and the radio is hated. The countryside answers with cold air, "rooks and starlings," and grass.
One image carries the poem's argument: "stop trying to crease the grass so much in your fingers, / they are not machines!" To crease something is to fold it into a fixed shape, which is what an overly exact translation does to a living text. Grass, like the original author's openness, resists being pinned down. The exclamation "they are not machines!" is the poem's nearest approach to a manifesto, though the manifesto sits in the middle of a rant, which keeps it from sounding pompous.
The ending is what makes the poem more than a clever argument. After all the bossing, the voice turns inward: "my throat is in my heart, or vice versa." The "fast sounds burbling thickly through my morn" might be a foreign language, the radio, or the noise of the speaker's own mind. Judging by the wording, "morn" may also faintly echo "mourn," though the poem doesn't insist on it. The speaker then confesses to feeling "ticklish, crybabyish," even "crippled," with blood that "isn't running regularly." The person who needed the lecture, the poem suggests, was the speaker all along. The hearty advice about the country is shouted by someone who cannot yet follow it. The poem also stops with no full stop, so the unease is left hanging.
This is what gives the poem its significance. It treats translation as a bodily, emotional encounter, not a technical problem of equivalence. Reading across a language gap leaves you excited, a bit foolish, a bit ill, and Benson lets all of that show. He doesn't solve the problem of "no right translation." He turns it into a feeling you can almost taste, and he is honest enough to end on the speaker's nervous, irregular pulse instead of a tidy lesson.