Almost everybody agrees that poetry is what gets lost in translation. Poetry is said to be inseparable from the language in which it was originally written. Different languages not only have different prosodic systems, they also have different sound systems whose subtle effect is often difficult to estimate in the source language, let alone transferring that effect to the target language. A prose version of a poem in the same language does not have the same effect, perhaps not even the same meaning (Brooks1947:192-214; de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981:58). Moreover, literature in general, and poetry in particular, is more or less tied to the source culture, which often makes it difficult to transfer adequately to the target culture without some loss. Finally, the source language may offer, through historically established conventions, metaphoric possibilities that may not be available in the target language. This is obviously a special problem relating to the translatability of metaplioric language in general (see, for example, Newmark 1995:32-33).
Mohammad Asfour