Art Talk with NEA Literature Translation Fellow Dan Bellm Dan Bellm. Photo by Annie Silverstein "We owe it to each other to read world literature, to cross borders, to enter other lives and times in the way that only great writing can." -- Dan Bellm Professor, editor, translator, and poet -- 2013 NEA Literature Translation Fellow Dan Bellm has some serious Renaissance man bona fides. In addition to translating the work of Pablo Neruda, Manlio Argueta, and Csar Vallejo, he has been translating French writer Pierre Reverdy's work for almost a decade. In 1998, Bellm received the Caesura Prize, judged by Mark Doty, for his poem, "Aspens," and an Artists Fellowship for Literature from the California Arts Council. Bellm's poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry , Ploughshares , The Threepenny Review , and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry . We spoke with Bellm about his writer's life, his philosophy of literary translation, and why he likes taking apart poems to "see how they tick." NEA: What's your version of the artist's life? DAN BELLM: The artist's life, to me, means doing work I love, which includes continuing to try work that challenges or scares me. I'm not very interested in writing or translating the kind of poem I've already written or translated. The work has to pose some kind of question or riddle that I don't know the answer to; when I'm lucky, I grab a thread and just hold on. Or to take