I should like to read poetry in many different languages, but I have no room on this shelf for a row of dictionaries. So I shall be happy to find parallel texts, and happy too to have these with prose translations. I want to read poetry, not translationese.

That's why, a few months ago, I wrote in this column about the pleasure of reading Ronsard in the Penguin Selected Poems, which gives you French text, prose translation, introduction and notes by Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock. This is a perfect example of the kind of thing I want in this New Poetry Library of mine. And so it receives its own accession number, NPL-1.

Now I must do something to triangulate this beautiful library, which is going to wear its scholarship so lightly and with such panache. I must choose again. One of my favourite English poets is George Herbert, and it happens that his Complete English Works is available in Everyman's Library, a handy hardback edited and introduced by Ann Pasternak Slater. This has modernised spelling, and nice clear print. And it has everything Herbert wrote in English, including his admirable collection of "Outlandish Proverbs".

"Call me not an olive till thou see me gathered." "Who eats his cock alone must saddle his horse alone." "Whether you boil snow or pound it, you can have but water of it." "I gave the mouse a hole, and she is become my heir." "The tongue walks where the teeth speed not." These are a few outlandish thoughts to accompany us through life. "The crow bewails the sheep, and then eats it." "Building is a sweet impoverishing." So that's the Herbert problem solved. That's NPL-2.

And now, because I by no means want my library to surrender to the obvious - although I love obviousness too - I shall add a document of remarkable poetic interest, even though it, by its nature, falls short of constituting a poem. This is Stéphane Mallarmé's For Anatole's Tomb, translated with an introduction and afterword by Patrick McGuinness (Carcanet).

This is like a sheaf of pages on which Mallarmé, after the death of his young son, tries to write the poem that will be the child's "tombeau" - his tombstone, something rather larger than an epitaph (as in Le Tombeau de Couperin by Ravel). Mallarmé wrote several of these "tombeaux" in memory of artists such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Wagner and Poe. But grief for his son, and his wife's grief, made the composition of this tribute impossible.

Given that I have (and I am rude enough to assume many of my readers have) a far from perfect knowledge of French, it is particularly difficult to approach, say, French symbolist poetry, with its terrific vocabulary and its delight in employing the puzzling word. Sometimes it is easier to read an ancient poetry than a more modern one, because in a traditional poetry the meaning of the word can be guessed from its context. Reading fragmentary notes in a foreign language is difficult, although the vocabulary may be simple. The grammar of a sentence, being incomplete, may leave us baffled or make us uncertain.

The language of For Anatole's Tomb is very simple, much more simple than one supposes the final poem would have been, if written. And the translation, in this case, is much more than a straight prose crib. It is poetic, but in a way that seeks exactness. It never seems to take inappropriate liberties.

Writing a poem out of grief is an act that we may find repugnant, if it seems to us that, by planning or contemplating the poem, we hasten the death of the loved one in the sense that we force it to become real. The weight of the flowers on the lid of the tomb is like the weight of a stone that prevents the dead from coming back to us. The living, "by believing that the dead one has in fact died, are largely responsible for making death irrevocable," as McGuinness puts it.

Such were the sorts of feelings that came between the father and the writing of the poem for the son. But these must be universal feelings. And some version of these problems faces anyone who tries to write a poem. So this document (NPL-3) is more than an unwritten poem by Mallarmé. It is like a universal unwritten poem.