THERE'S A COMMON EXPRESSION in literary studies that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Indeed, translating poetry is one of the most difficult things a writer can do. Can you capture the nuances of a text's language—including wordplay, irony, humor, or cultural references—for a new audience? How can a translator respect a poem's artistic form and its original social context while also creating a work that is meaningful to a new audience?

One persistent idea underlying the academic field of Western translation studies is the so-called “invisibility” of the translator. When translators do their job properly, so the thinking goes, the audience isn't even aware that a translator exists—it's only when a text exhibits an awkward or stilted “translationese” or introduces confusing or unfamiliar words that an audience knows something has gone awry. Philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah argues for the value of “thick translation” and making acts of translation recognizable to the audience through annotations, glosses, and commentary; since translations can never enact word for word correspondences, a thick translation “seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context.” Translator, author, and cultural theorist Tejaswini Niranjana has argued that “translators can intervene to inscribe heterogeneity, to warn against myths of purity” and to offer “a more densely textured understanding of who ‘we’ are.” Poets of color often find themselves writing against Eurocentric traditions that assume the white (male) subject as the “default” (or universal “we”), and when poets of color translate or adapt European texts, they confront the choice of whether to make their racial positionings and sociopolitical stances explicit—or to conform to dutiful white norms of self-effacement. The “double bind” that translators and poets of color face is not only the obligation to convey the “rich cultural and linguistic context” of a work to a new audience, but also the question of when, or how, to make their (our) racial identities “visible,” or recognizable, to a reading audience.

This chapter considers how poets of color adapt (or adopt) themes and structures of Old English and Middle English literature to address the illusory dimensions of translation and race, when the labor—and racial identity—of a poetic translator flickers in and out of view (to use an optical metaphor).