What a nice thing to happen on a wet Monday! I was delighted to read the translations of my poem, for several reasons. First of all, it's a lovely present, having one's own work translated. Thank you, Anna, Sabine, Chrissanti and Theresa. I read your versions with great enjoyment, and was deeply impressed by your ability to make the poem work on all levels – linguistic, stylistic, poetic – in German. And then, the poem that I thought I knew so well has suddenly become something new and different: four semi-strangers, with all sorts of neat and impressive ways of expressing themselves that sometimes seem to me to read better than the original. And then, the experience made me think about how some parts of a poem seem pretty inflexible – they all get translated in much the same way – while others send the translators off in all sorts of directions, rather like the parallel lines in my poem. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that four German women all have their own individual, personal and highly expressive ways of saying 'You bastards!'. What can this mean? This is another very rewarding episode in my long-standing love affair with the German language. I'm most grateful to all of you.

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Michael Swan