In 1997, Rainer Schulte spoke to the American Literary Translators Association commenting about how his own work as a translator affects the way he interprets the world.
Translators are always willing to embrace the other, to venture into new landscapes. . . .
Translators are eager to get to the next corner where the geography of words has changed and new ways of seeing and feeling rise at the horizon. This way of seeing is everywhere present in Schulte s latest volume of poetry, A Language Without Geography . The translator s habit of mind has Schulte restlessly peering around the next corner, past fixed ways of seeing, into the mysteries that hide beneath the surface of words. More than a declaration of artistic impersonality, the dictum warns against relying on habit personal, cultural, or historical when composing. The warning guides the reader of his volume as well, for resurrecting the poem is as much a feat of readership, one feels, as authorship.