[...] Having completed the translation of these 44 poems from all periods of his poetry, I can now quite clearly distinguish where I make Cummings "circular" and where I "square" him; where I allow myself, slightly, to betray him and where I appear more prominently among the verses; where I wish to graft him (irrationally?) with a, for example, "Celanian" element (in these children singing in stone a), and where to take liberties, within the framework of his own "agrammatical" aesthetics. Thus, translating the poet who has elevated the fragment and the section to an aesthetic value, how could I not proceed once or twice to internal word cuts, when the Greek language favors it, even if he himself does not do so in that verse. The "spine", for instance, broke and became "spinal column", assuming that his ingenuity would consent, if he could know the possibilities of the Greek language's influence on his speech. Similarly, the cubist and transformative function of his thought felt to allow me to write "through landscape" instead of his "through which", while elsewhere, his "O/cean" almost necessarily turns into "Ω/cean".

In the more traditional forms (such as his tampered sonnets), I tried to follow the music of Cummings' rhyme where he places it, and his subtle ruptures with tradition where I suspected or saw that he desired them. I systematically attempted to listen to and incorporate his rhythmology and broken melody into the translation in all cases - even in poems where you might perhaps overlook them. When the rhythmic composition of the poem demanded it, I did not hesitate to add even words or small phrases (a "without a word" here, a "like an abyss" there), even if Cummings never wrote them in English. Moreover, I did not want to avoid one or two hints of a very personal humor. Thus, a "nipponized bit" ("Japanized piece" of an aerial railway, which at the end of the poem crushes someone exemplarily incorrigible with ruthless justice), I found it impossible to resist rendering as "Japanese piece": a wink to my friend Giannis Thavoris, who had long invented the private pun "Japanese life". As for the famous Buffalo Bill, I preferred to call him as we did as children: with the echo of buffaloes and the rough masculinity of a mythical Wild West. Buffalo, not Baffalo, then.
[...]

Other very basic translation objectives were the vivid depiction of internal ruptures, discontinuities, and the grammatical, orthographic, and syntactic "errors" of his language. At the same time, I wanted to maintain "as inviolably as possible" the fidelity of meaning, usually taking care to limit even this use of analogies.

I will consider myself lucky if only a few of these efforts are visible to the naked eye in the final translation, and ultimately if it does not seem so much like a translation. Therefore, if the "cannibalistic incorporation" of the original has been achieved with a balance of absolute violence-rupture and absolute tenderness-reparation.

In any case, and regardless of the outcome, I think that now perhaps we can finally rest.

(from the afterword by Vassilis Amanatidis)