When I first started “The Poet’s Cellist,” I kept using the word “translate.” I’d say I was translating poems into cello, like there was a clean one-to-one exchange happening—words becoming notes, meaning becoming sound.
But the more I worked on it, the less that word made sense.
Translation makes it sound like there’s a fixed version of the poem that I’m trying to preserve in another form, like I’m carrying it carefully from one language to another without losing anything. But that’s not really what happens. The cello doesn’t preserve the poem; it reacts to it.
Sometimes it even pushes back.
There are moments where a poem feels open and flowing, and the cello follows that easily. But there are other moments where the music wants to stretch in a different direction, or hold onto something longer than the text does. And instead of trying to correct that, I’ve started to listen to it. That tension feels more honest than trying to force everything into alignment.
That’s when I started thinking of it less as translation, and more as conversation.
A conversation doesn’t require perfect agreement. It doesn’t even require full sentences in the same “language.” It’s responsive. One voice says something, and the other responds—not always directly, sometimes tangentially, sometimes emotionally rather than literally.
That’s how the cello works in relation to the poem. It doesn’t repeat or explain it. It listens, and then it answers in its own way.
And like any conversation, there are misunderstandings. Moments where the cello lingers on something the poem has already moved past, or where it seems to anticipate something the text hasn’t said yet. I used to think those moments were mistakes. Now they feel like part of the relationship.
Because the goal isn’t accuracy; it’s presence.
If I stay too focused on matching the poem exactly, the music becomes flat, like it’s just following instructions. But when I let go of that idea, something more interesting happens. The cello starts to feel like it has its own voice in the exchange. Not separate from the poem, but not subordinate to it either.
It’s more like two perspectives looking at the same emotional space from different angles.
So I’ve stopped trying to translate poems into music. Instead, I try to stay in dialogue with them. I listen, I respond, I sometimes misunderstand, and then I respond again.
And somewhere in that back-and-forth, something new starts to form that neither the poem nor the cello could have made alone.
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