The blog of 24PearlStreet has published an interview with poet and translator Chloe Garcia-Roberts about the creativity of translation and writing outside genres. Here’s how it begins:

MAIREAD HADLEY: In what ways is translation a creative process? Would you describe it as such?

CHLOE GARCIA-ROBERTS: It is completely a creative process. In the same way that drawing from life is a creative process. My subject is there, independent and complete, but my job is to recreate that subject in a different language. To so effectively draws on everything that I have to the same depths as any of my own writing, albeit in a completely different way.

For me, translation is a complementary creative process to creative writing. I was discussing it with a colleague just this week and articulated the relationship between the two as a form of crop rotation. If I am in poetry writing mode all the time, I get depleted, and if I am in translation mode all the time, I also get depleted. But if I alternate the two in my life, they feed each other, they make the yields stronger for either effort, and they enrich me more.

Click the image for the full interview.