  Collective coordinates provide a powerful tool for separating collective and
elementary excitations, allowing both to be treated in the full quantum theory.
The price is a canonical transformation which leads to a complicated starting
point for subsequent calculations. Sometimes the collective behavior of a
soliton is simple but nontrivial, and one is interested in the elementary
excitations. We show that in this case an alternative prescription suffices, in
which the canonical transformation is not necessary. The use of a
nonperturbative operator which creates a soliton state allows the theory to be
constructed perturbatively in terms of the soliton normal modes. We show how
translation invariance may be perturbatively imposed. We apply this to
construct the two-loop ground state of an arbitrary scalar kink.
