ABSTRACT
The central question that all studies of the translation of poetry have asked, implicitly or explicitly, is whether poetry can be translated (see translatability). It may seem obvious that it can, for poetry has always been widely translated, and some poets, such as Catullus or Rilke, have been translated many times. In fact, translated poetry plays such a large part in the literature of most cultures that it is taken very much for granted (Honig 1985: 1). English readers of Virgil or Omar Khayyám or Alvarez's (1992) anthology Modern European Poetry, for example, might see the poems as foreign without necessarily reading them as translations. This could be taken as evidence that they have been successfully translated, if translation is viewed as a type of writing which avoids drawing attention to itself.
