After publishing my translation of Daniel Varoujan’s Pagan Songs in 2019—which, to be candid, contained as much of me as it did Varoujan, what with my behemoth fifty page preface and an additional twenty pages of appendices for sixty something pages of translated poetry—I said almost nothing about its reception, partly because there was no reception to speak of, but also partly because my brain child was well armed against the nitpicks which a handful of reviewers threw its way. The martyrdom of its author was a built-in defense mechanism, which instantly insulated it from a wide swathe of...
