The poems and translations in Harmony in Babel entertain one paradox of life today. Paul Friedrich guides us through a Babel of words, and worlds of the imagination ranging from his translations from five languages(notably the Russian of his literary studies) to the poetry of the Indian Mexico of his anthropological field work to America writ large -- super highways, a Vermont farm, father and child. Yet beneath the images, lyric forms, erotic and work-place variations, and figures of languages, breathes an aesthetic harmony and a sense of human concord -- like eating a pomegranate together in the dark.