The Genius of Translation

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s translations of Benjamin Fondane, the Romanian francophone poet-philosopher increasingly recognized as a vital, enduring figure of Jewish and world literature, and of Paul Valéry, a writer as significant to French letters as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are to the anglophone world, but whose dense, compact, intricate verse is far more formally demanding than theirs (imagine John Donne or George Herbert in the age of Fernando Pessoa), have been justly praised. He is, as well, a talented poet.