“[S]o many of the features of the Chinese language” – the vocal tones, the lack of verb tenses, the very fact of words as ideographs rather than groups of letters – “which poets manipulate in complex and subtle ways, are totally untranslatable into English.” Yet there’s an abundance of classic Chinese verse in English: “despite all the barriers, this poetry does communicate, even urgently, to modern Western readers.” How do translators make this communication happen?