"Stavans gives us not a book but a library, not an event but a festival of events, all in one volume, many traditions in the mirror of one man's eyes. It is refreshing, in this age of factual horrors and fake truths, to find a poetic voice that takes on the bewilderment of our moment and points to how it, too, can become an originator for creation, invention, and celebration of imaginative capacities of a human voice. Translation is an art, and art transforms close attentiveness into something larger, something that can cross borders, survive the test of time. When we translate words in a quiet room, we enter a communion with a company much larger than ourselves. Multiple voices that once lived in and with that language sit near us, in that quiet room, and read that text with us. 'Translation is the slowest way to read a poem,' one of Stavans's invented commentators asserts. Indeed. And this book, with its bold claim of translator as heteronym, offers us many possible ways of reading, of seeing.

".