The speaker of Benson's poem begins with a modest confession: reading a translation means poking "around the words, / not at them." It is a circling, indirect kind of reading, a guess at "a reality not hinted at / but encoded by some prisoner from another world." That phrase is the first jolt. The original writer is no longer a colleague or a voice but a captive, smuggling messages out of a place the reader can never enter. The speaker shrugs it off in a flat, chatty tone ("nobody's perfect"), but the image has already planted a sense of confinement and distance.
The line breaks keep that distance in view. The writer is "un- / known to us but through his function," and the hyphen splits the word "unknown" across two lines, so the gap in knowledge appears on the page itself. The writer survives only as a "function," a producer of "images / thoughts perhaps of trees cows judgings ravings." That list has no commas and runs the pastoral ("trees cows") straight into the mental ("judgings ravings"). The speaker cannot tell whether the original contains landscape or madness, so everything arrives in one undifferentiated heap. Even "perhaps" shows how little can be trusted.
Then the poem turns on itself. "Oh i'm an impotent feeling self-important fool" is a sudden self-attack, and the sound of it does some of the work: "impotent" and "self-important" nearly rhyme, as if the speaker's own vanity and helplessness were two halves of one word. What follows is a fantasy of escape from the whole problem of interpretation. "Consume the country, become one with it, i say to myself!" Reading, it seems, could be swapped for eating. If the original can't be decoded, perhaps it can be swallowed, and the foreign place absorbed. The poem undercuts the idea almost as soon as it appears, because becoming one with the country ends in "belch and forget it." Appetite turns out to be crude and forgetful, and the lofty dream of union gets a bodily noise for an ending. The word "consume" may also hint at something uncomfortable about taking in another culture for one's own use, though the poem leaves that to the reader.
The wish for relief is aimed at the speaker's own life as much as at the foreign text: "no more nervous city twisting and coiling of coffee / and smokes, no more routines, schedules or lack of them!" The verbs "twisting" and "coiling" make the city feel like something intestinal or snakelike, and the final clause, "or lack of them," is quietly funny and sad. Even freedom from schedules would be another kind of schedule. The speaker can't picture an exit that isn't already part of the trap.
Then comes the break: "what the fuck!—". The dash cuts the thought off, and the language turns physical and panicked. "My hand sticks in my throat" suggests choking, or the gag reflex, and it echoes the earlier belch. Since this speaker reads and presumably writes, the hand may also be a writing hand, though that is an inference rather than something the poem says. Next, "my heart weaves through its arteries" has a strange delicacy, as though the body were making its own text. The line before the end, "mind shorts," borrows the language of electrical failure. The poem stops on "everywhere blood!", a short exclamation that arrives with no explanation or recovery.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme or regular meter. Its long, breathless lines sound like thinking out loud, and the sentences keep swerving, interrupted by dashes, semicolons and exclamation marks. The last lines pick up speed, with clipped clauses piling onto each other until the poem has nowhere left to go.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it treats translation as an experience of the body, not just a puzzle of meaning. The urge to understand another mind, the poem suggests, can curdle into an urge to possess it, and when that fails, the reader is left with only themselves, shaken and exposed. Benson gives no tidy lesson. He lets the speaker unravel, which is a more honest picture of what it feels like to strain toward someone you can't quite hear.