SOURCE: “In a Room Where We Are Absent,” in Hungry Mind Review, Spring, 1993, p. 32.

In the following review, Neville notes the painful subject matter but eloquent writing in The Horse Has Six Legs, edited and translated by Simic.

I've always thought it eerie the way a voice from another culture can come through in the English of a good translation. it's as though a ghost had passed through a wall. “Poetry is what is retained in translation,” not what is lost, poet Charles Simic argues. After reading The Horse Has Six Legs, I have to agree with his optimism.

The book begins with “Oral Poetry, Women's Songs,” a group of early folk poems collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I was drawn to the raw, earthy ones.

The sky is strewn with stars And the wide meadow with sheep. The sheep have no shepherd Except for crazy...