content: As a translator I can sympathize with Gass' approach. He gets to fault all the other translators (this writer included)while also, implicitly and explicitly, celebrating his own results. But despite this rhetorical cunning, Gass, who is a fine essayist and novelist, does not have a poet's ear, and again and again his versions fall short of effective poetry. They must stand by themselves, ultimately, and while he does his utmost to justify them, they tend to reveal why he needs special pleading to put them before us as supposedly superior to other versions. Mine, from the mid-seventies, first published in FIELD and now available from Norton, have reached a wide public without this kind of explaining, carping, and denigration of the efforts of others.