From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase.

My strength is translating emotion because I'm such a feeler.

I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

"When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

Anxiety always originates from a lie. All lies, whether self generated or accepted from another person, will resonate as a pendulum swinging to and fro as a reminder of an inconsistency with truth and impeccability. The further the lie is carried, the more the intensity of anxiety builds. The feeling may begin as unease, building to angst, translating to anxiety, panic, and even dread. Ultimately, anxiety creates stagnancy. What's the solution? Speak the truth even if it scares you. Be authentic.

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own but what it is I just don't know.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.

Whatever the medium there is the difficulty challenge fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really for new ways of translating the beauty of it.