When I walk through my apartment in underpants, or wearing nothing at all (what, me worry?), I mumble to myself in Arabic, or Hebrew, or German, or English. When I go senile, possibly in the not too distant future, it would be interesting to see what language my mind would choose at any given time to express itself. European languages are fundamentally different from American English, at least the way they impact my mind. Europeans are descended from feudal environments. When I was a child I worked in enormous fields that belonged to the Baron. Very difficult to explain how we view “Kultur” differently, more seriously. The Russians know all about this. Writers are considered dangerous if they veer from the party line, and there are serious consequences. If I am to read a book by Dostoyevsky, or Pasternak, or Tolstoy, I very much prefer to reed it in German, because we are a part of the main, the Eurasian cultural continent. I view my poetry in this light. It seems to me that it is not in the American mainstream. My influences were Nelly Sachs and Paul Çelan. There is an absolutely lovely photo of Nelly Sachs straightening Shay Agnon’s tie just before they walked onstage to receive the Nobel Prize. There is no way to translate these people. I attempted to, with Sachs’s poem “If the prophets broke in through doors of night,” probably the most powerful poem I’ve ever come across. Hebrew is absolutely impossible. Bible translations? There is no such thing. There are interpretations of the Hebrew, which is why there are dozens of Bible versions. In a standard bilingual version it is very easy to find on every page two Hebrew words on the right side and seven English words on the left. This is not translation. Style is a victim of translation. Going from one book to the next in the first five books of the Bible is like going from Faulkner to Hemingway. Not only did a different author write these books, they were written in a different era, because the vocabulary changes. I learned Hebrew in a Kibbutz Ulpan when I was thirty. While I am fluent in everyday situations, I am not fluent enough to translate my own poetry.