My Chinese is pretty abysmal, but I recently read a Chinese poem called 

 and was struck by how much I felt was lost in its accompanying English translation. 

There are whole levels of subtext in the Chinese language that doesn’t carry over, such as:

The poem uses both the word “page” and “leaf”, but in Chinese the word “page” sounds exactly the same as the word “leaf”, giving “page” a double meaning that's lost in translation.

The author goes by she/her pronouns, and refers to “you” with the female “you” pronoun, giving another meaning to “dare” and be “brave”, especially since LGBT rights are not recognized in China. There’s no female second-person pronoun in the English language, so this significance is dropped.

I couldn’t help but to try and write my own translation. I changed around a few words so it flows in a different way when read aloud. I tried changing words like “page”  to “leaf” in order to try and merge “page” and “leaf” closer together. While working on this, I gained a greater appreciation for the original translation. For example, the fourth stanza starts three lines in a row with the words "don't we", which I feel captures the spirit as well as preserves the anaphora in the original text. Anyways, here’s the text + my translation:

一個在等候的人跟一個在轉身的人