It is frustrating, not to say humiliating, to think how much one is missing by not knowing any language except one’s own. When you travel in a country it does not open its heart to you unless you know the language. For another thing, great literatures in other languages hide their glories from us. It is simply not possible to get the full flavour, the soul, the innermost sense of writing in another language through translation.
This is especially true of poetry. Indeed Robert Frost defined poetry as “what gets lost in translation.” Translate a poem and the essence escapes us. I can’t remember which one it was but one of the great Russian writers said that a poem translated bears the same resemblance to the actual poem as kissing a beautiful woman through a handkerchief bears to kissing her properly on the lips.