Poems are probably the most difficult genre to translate. Before translating poetry it’s important to know the exact meaning of the poem so that there’s no misunderstanding with interpretation. Once you start to translate from another language to English you start to encounter the ambiguity that is found in the English language that is less likely to be found in French for instance. Andrew who speaks French can see the flow and romanticism that the original poem had which was something hard for him to recreate. To do so Andrew had to rely on the use of literary devices such as alteration.  I think that the biggest challenge when translating any writing is keeping the meaning as true as possible because in translation is almost impossible to not water down the poem a little. Whether the author is alive or not has its pros and cons. Some of the pros are that your work will be revised by the author which will for sure make the translation more true to the original text as possible. However, it also can make the process of translating the text even more challenging and stressful since the author will have high expectations of your work or in this case translation. When Andrew Zawacki was explaining how it was like to translate Sébastien Smirou’s poems something I found was very interesting was how when the author is alive he, of course, gets to criticize your work and make it the way he wants. An example that Mr. Zawacki gave was that Smirou wanted the font size of the letters to be the same as the one in the original book. He also wanted the spacing between the sentences to the same. These are little details that make a difference for the authors of these books, but of course, this won’t be able to happen if the author is dead. Finally, Andrew’s reading of his translation of Smirou’s poems showed me all the factor that must be taken in to count when translating someone’s work in order to make it as close to the original as possible.