I know some of you are translators. Please to explain: I just finished reading Straight is the Gate by Andre Gide, translated into English by the despicable Dorothy Bussy. Surely the only logical reason for producing an English translation of a French novel is so that English-speakers who cannot understand French may read it. So why, why does Dorothy Bussy choose to leave untranslated from French the poetry quoted by characters; poetry which bears importantly on the rest of the novel, and in some instances runs over a page, a page-and-a-half in length? Not a single line of the 100 or so quoted is made penetrable for the hapless anglophone reader. How can this possibly be justified? Doesn't the fact of purchasing an English translation of a French novel speak for my French-language abilities? Why make an exception for poetry, which if anything will be harder to understand than prose?