This book benefited from the exacting eyes of several early readers whose insights made it much better than it would have been, most notably Ben Downing, Jacky Colliss Harvey, William Rodarmor, Damion Searls, and Shelby Vincent. To them I express my profound gratitude.
My thanks to the editors of the periodicals that published early portions of what become these chapters: Herb Leibowitz of Parnassus, Jill Rosser of the New Ohio Review, and Rainer Schulte of Translation Review. I also thank Charles Hatfield, Associate Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas, Dallas; Marilyn Kallet, Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee; and the poet and translator Clayton Eshleman, in his capacity as visiting professor at UCLA, for giving me a chance to road-test some of my ideas in their graduate seminars.
At MIT Press, I'm grateful to my editor and fellow translator Marc Lowenthal, who commissioned this book and has provided advice through its various stages, and to production editor Marcy Ross and copy editor David Hill for their help in bringing the text to its final form.
Various friends and colleagues have inspired me and helped shaped my thinking over the years with their writings, thoughts, guidance, and conversation, in particular Esther Allen, Harold Augenbraum, David Bellos, Rika Lesser, Ron Padgett, Trevor Winkfield, and Bill Zavatsky.
Thank you to my parents, Mario and Grace Polizzotti, for many years of support and encouragement; to my son, Alex Polizzotti, for enthusiastic curiosity about this project since the beginning; and to my partner, Jacky Colliss Harvey, for listening to its many iterations with consummate grace and much-needed reassurance.
Finally, I will always be indebted to Jean-Louis Bouttes and Maurice Roche, who (however inadvertently) first set me on the path of translation, one from which I've never looked back.