I cheated, you say? Yes, of course. But why cheat, you ask?
As Richard Feynman (a Nobel laureate in Physics, even more famous for his Lectures) once wrote (about nature, in another famous book of lectures simply called QED), that one can only explain how. One can not explain why. Never.
Why does one translated line work and not another? No-one knows. Deep, subconscious streams are running through the cavern of man's tribal soul - inaccessible except through myth - whose dark, impenetrable waves suddenly sparkle in the light of a poem. Or, though much rarer, in the light of a translation. They sparkle like our universe that, save for the sparkle of its stars, would be invisible. You see it or you don't. To see or not to see, that's still the question...
As in the classroom - if you forgive an old prof for talking shop - what matters is not what is said. What matters is what is received. And a poem will either reach and resonate with the psyche of the student - or it won't. This has little to do with the outer accuracy of words. It has to do with the inner response to cadences of images and metaphors for meaning.
I should shove the purple prose and fess up? If you insist - but it will leave you poorer. After all, would you go to the theatre to find out how the props work and what the prompter says?
This poem's rhyme structure is difficult. Double four-on-the-floor. Even the author - hence doubly the translator - bounced up and down in that bubbling cauldron of toil and trouble. But it surely didn't stop her from writing a magnificent poem...
Alright, the rhyming is one problem. Meaning is another. This is not Cartesian logic. Our semantic rules do not quite apply. This is non-dualism - to further misunderstand this much misunderstood term so beloved by our saffron friends.
I should cut out the crap? Boy, are you ever getting testy. But I like that. Because you will be starting to understand, once your defenses are starting to work. Once you sort out the fibers, like the cotton gin does. The fibers that will form the web of your life...
But alright. Let's cut out the euphemisms. When you do your New Age thing, you are marching to the beat of the Eastern drummer. The poet didn't - but she could sense it coming. She drank deeply of the times. And she described them, magnificently so - and long before you were paying your dues to the New Age and getting nothing but trivia in return.
It has to do with what is outside and what is inside, my friend, and never the twain shall meet - except, as Kießling says, by walking the rainbow bridge of a poem. Hence: Welcome to my collection...