Reading, the speaker of "Translations 1A" admits right away, is a kind of trespass. "I'm obliged to project myself," the first line says, and then the sentence drops its preposition, as if the grammar had slipped in transit. Project myself into what? The next lines answer with a jumble: "the original author's thrill writing and / the expanse: trees, sky, tremendous dogs fighting." What the reader chases here is a sensation and a whole landscape behind the words, not a neat meaning. The dogs make sure it isn't a tidy postcard. "For me this is to read," the speaker says flatly, and the colon before it works like a hinge.
The poem's account of translation is deliberately slippery. "There exists no best translation, however one admires the vain effort / none makes to make it all the same." Admiring an effort that nobody makes could be a joke, a slip or a confession. Either way, the sentence acts out the failure it describes: it tries to say "the same" and tangles itself. Then comes the parenthesis, "(meanwhile sickening of the original!)", which suggests that even the source text goes stale when it is handled too much. That queasiness prompts the poem's big swerve.
From "Oh yucky repetitious pretensions of mind!" onward, the poem becomes a barrage of commands, part pep talk and part tantrum. "Yucky" is a child's word turned on the intellect, and "Dig cold air!" borrows hip slang. Yet the outdoors it prescribes is not pristine. "Know the ways of the city drag" and "Contemplate a while cigarettes and boiling coffee" bring nature in already smoked and brewed. Even "ramble determinedly about" yokes aimlessness to willpower. These touches keep the passage from being a simple back-to-nature sermon. The speaker seems to know the cure is a little absurd, and prescribes it anyway.
The cure is hunger. Mouths run through the whole poem: "get your jaws wide! eat / Mother Nature!", then "edible," then "lips, / teeth and tongues." The line break after "eat" leaves a beat of appetite before its object lands. Reading turns into digestion, and the thinking mind gives way to the body. "Nothing is mechanical! All organic" sets this against "contraptions (like radio)," while "nameless birds" stand outside the translator's usual business of finding the right name. The line "fingers play in grasses without attempt to bend and cut" can be read as a picture of how to handle a text: touch it without forcing it into a new shape. That is an inference, but the poem's rejection of "the vain effort" to make everything the same supports it.
The ending drops the exclamation marks. "As I hear these words cascading / through a difficult hour..." trails into an ellipsis, and the voice becomes quieter and more exposed. "Ticklish, salty in the eyes" holds laughter and tears together. Then comes the pun: "I limp / but am not limp." The first "limp" is a hobble, the second a slackness. The line break lets the admission of damage hang there before the denial arrives. The final image, "erratically bleeding inside," is irregular like the poem itself, which has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its lines are long and speech-like, and they spill over breaks ("Time comes / your guilt will crack") the way talk spills over a breath. Sound does some of the binding that rhyme would do elsewhere, as in the clustered consonants of "cigarettes and boiling coffee" and "jaws wide."
The poem matters because it treats translation as a model for all reading. If no version can be identical to the original, what remains is the reader's own body, its appetite, its tears and its limp. The title's "1A" hints at a numbered series, or one version among others (an inference from the label alone), and that fits a poem that refuses the idea of a final text. It also mixes registers boldly: abstract talk of "pretensions of mind," schoolyard disgust, hipster slang and a raw closing image all sit side by side. The result is a poem that argues against over-thinking while thinking hard, and that feels most truthful when it admits it is hurt.