Eric Hoffman has translated Emerson's "Journals" into a new language, distilling the originative matrix-the master's discursive prose-into two suites of lyric poems. This is translation as critique and renewal, a classic modernist project. Hoffman's poems are like a palimpsest or lithography stone on which traces of a previous drawing have survived. We are witnesses to the presence of a negotiation, the negotiation of a presence. "The Transparent Eye" is the latest manifestation of Hoffman's restless and manifold creativity, a creativity Emerson himself would have saluted. He would not...