Because so much of poetry is in its sounds and rhythms, a poem cannot truly be translated from one language to another. Words are a small part of the poem.

Words are so much a part of a culture that some foreign words have no equivalent in our own language; they represent nothing within our "vocabulary" of experience.

Even within one language, in one word, each person experiences a different response of feeling and memory and imagery.

Only an image can be translated with some accuracy; a diamond looks the same in Tibet or Tunisia or New York, though a diamond evokes a unique response within each person. A translator who has fallen in love might freely write of "the gem of romance"; a translator from a South Africa mining town might, with equal truth, describe "the rock of toil."