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Birdsong on the Seabed By Elena Shvarts, translated by Sasha Dugdale Bloodaxe, 171pp. £9.95IN THE EXCELLENT introduction to her translation of a selection of Elena Shvarts's recent poetry, Sasha Dugdale writes that she has "attempted to stay as close as possible to the Russian form", and she hopes that although the visionary poems "throw up difficulties for the translator, because trust in the poet's vision must be sustained and a comparable visionary quality must be found in English", the reader will still be "startled and excited by the eccentricity and novelty of the imagery".

The reader of translated poetry, it seems, has an acute version of the responsibility that falls on every reader of imaginative writing: to recreate for oneself a (necessarily different) version of what the original writer meant to say. The title poem of this book presents the poet's need to be heard, even though thus remotely, as a gap between species, imagining herself as a bird that "slides under the waves", that sings "perched on the bony arm/ of a drowned man" to the "cold-blooded beasts" that do not believe her "tales of heat".