A very wide one, which ranges from lust through to platonic devotion. One of the pleasures of the book was being able to include A. D. Hope's 'An Epistle', which looks at the transcendental love that can follow a sexual relationship, a major strand in thinking about love. That's not to say that transcendental love is best - I'm fairly much an in-the-body person myself. 1 didn't want it all to be high thought. I…
There is a whole industry in translation and it seems to me that even very famous poets when they're going through a rough patch in their own creativity resort to translation. It is almost like they're claiming or assimilating other people's work into their own particular voice. The word translation has a kind of authority which in some way undermines part of the separateness of the original; a word like forgery, or copy, suggests a…
