You don’t need to speak another language to love a bilingual edition

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What you have to do is find a book and let it open. Poetry and drama work best as they are made up of more discrete units defined visually on the page, and sometimes all you need is an image. In “The Rebel’s Silhouette,” for example, an untitled Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz on page 50 is placed opposite its translation, by the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, on page 51. Even if you don’t read Urdu, the The original is well outlined: four lines in two couplets, taking up barely a third of the page. On the right, English is an entirely different creature: Faiz’s twin couplets have been transmuted into seven-line verses, and Urdu’s equal weights have been redistributed, creating imbalances that are precarious but deliberate. The transformation is in black and white, as if the Urdu were a clay bowl that Ali transformed into a vase. One great charm of a bilingual edition is that you don’t have to give up one for the other, like you would with a translation. You can have both at the same time and treat the language like a Jenga tower, moving its pieces but keeping its structure.

The closer you get to both languages, of course, the more you will appreciate. In “Of Death” by Hilda Hilst. Minimal Odes”, a 2018 book translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin, begins a poem, “No coração, no olhar.” For the Anglophone reader, looking over and seeing that what appears as the word “no” is not, in Portuguese, a negation but “en el” (“In the heart, in the look”), is an indicator of how much range there are: how many different ways there are to express something. Some of them go beyond the words themselves. Look at the beginning of another untitled poem and you can hear the music of “It will pass / it has passed / it will pass with its fine blade” — the time-traveling verb, resonant sibilants, alliteration. Eglin has translated the verse as “He will pass / he has passed / he passes with his fine knife”, capturing even that double “f”. It’s like a song written for the piano played by the violin: the same melody in a different key, perhaps; a reminder that there are so many tools at your disposal.

It could be read translated, yes, or in a foreign language. Each is a worthwhile exercise, but each presents isolated language, a thought pinned to the blackboard. Bilingual editions, on the other hand, capture the possibility. Consider Gabriela Mistral’s “A Woman,” translated by Randall Couch from Spanish: “When she says ‘Aleppo pine’ / she’s not saying a tree but a child.” For an inarticulate citizen of recent times, moments like this, when aleppo pine becomes “alep pine”, which becomes “a boy”, are a reminder not only that the right words are there, but that while language can be abused and distorted by forces beyond me, I also have access to it. It can be used not only to destroy meaning, but also to find it, to create it, to share it. You could say that what I’m looking for, what these books offer, is a display of power.

Hasan Altafi is editor of the New York Review of Books.