The facing of what is in front of you, by sorting out what is behind, goes into the careful syntactical processing of a sentence. Law and grammar must coexist in that cell. This coexistence requires the exaction of judgement. Poetic language goes to the extreme with this exaction, and the more extreme it is, the more otherly it becomes. It transforms the state of being lost into that of being free, by making judgement on judgement itself.
Poetry writes twice, and produces another sound from the ordinary.
In this sense it is free out of its longing to escape the cell of syntax. Much like the term 'interlinear' which Walter Benjamin uses to describe a perfect translation, poetic language combines literalness with this free overview of its own construction. And this very language, whose divination and description is the only perfection a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations. This language of translation, as Benjamin perceives it, is like poetic language because of the fusion of a literal reading of the word with the freedom of a second look. The contemporaneous moment involves such a fusing.