Among the very many things that could be said about this imaginative new translation - even the hardened offender is going to blanch a little at the thought of reviewing Faust - two seem to me to stand out.
Being imaginative means using your imagination more.
ETO's most imaginative and radical intervention has been commissioning new English translations of the words of the Bach chorales, each from a different writer and embracing a wide range of beliefs.
In 2006, the poet published a verse-translation of Dante's Inferno and the imaginative influence of that undertaking is keenly felt in the menacing gloom of these waterways.
In Hebrew and in translation, Mr. Amichai's work is remarkably accessible, imaginative, unburdened by artificiality and often almost conversational.
These works part translation, part transformation magnificently reenergize classic texts with Hughes's own imaginative powers and preoccupations.
One is to mimic the elastic movement driven by repelling forces from extruded disks, the other is to simulate a whole translation movement of the disks driven by a pulling force from an imaginative elastic rope connecting the centroid of the disks and the center of the container.
"The age-old grammar-translation method of teaching Latin and Greek is giving way to more imaginative and innovative approaches," he wrote in a 1973 article supporting such innovation.
Wright's translations, meanwhile, capture "all of their passion, their desperation and their soaring imaginative energy," said Tonkin, who was joined on the judging panel by Alev Adil, Natalie Haynes, Nadifa Mohamed and Shaun Whiteside.
His less familiar, moody settings of translations of poems by the medieval Italian poet Folgore da San Gimignano are more harmonically imaginative.
