In this lecture, Ansary uses the problem of translating poetry as a frame for examining the difficulty of communication across any border, cultural, historical, or personal: using anecdotes from his own experiences as a bilingual person, he elaborates the idea that no message can be mapped directly from one language to another, because the act of translation severs countless capillaries of assumptions and understandings wedding any message to its cultural context. Switching languages entails switching personas. Yet understanding how an entire cultural frame is involved in every word and phrase of a language also points toward ways that we in the West can comprehend the world as experienced by the East, how we in the twenty-first century can comprehend the world as experienced by people of the past, how we as individuals can comprehend the world as seen by any other person.