Every published poem is its own elegy. What poet is not astonished, reading the mere poem on the mere page? The mere transcription of that other poem onto paper is a calamity, a desecration. Every poem, one might say, is a failed translation, an accidental imposter manufractured by the incompetence of a weak-eyed translator sweating in the light of a lantern whose wick is badly in need of a trimming.

- Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K