Problems in translating poetry

2.3. Metaphoric expressions. Besides having found their place in our everyday conversations, metaphors are an essential element of poetry. They can be used as a way to make ideas sound more lyrical, to communicate them without naming them, or even to make rhyming easier! But metaphors can rarely be translated literally: they either have a direct equivalent in the target language (every translator’s dream) or they don’t, and it gets more complicated. A lot of the time, metaphors from different languages call on different elements to express the same ideas: when English people complain about it raining cats and dogs, French people exclaim “il pleut des cordes!”, literally “it’s raining ropes”… (As to deciding which one makes the more sense, your guess is as good as mine). Metaphors, much like jargon or slang, take their roots in a place’s culture or history. Therefore, something like “Turkeys voting for Christmas”, expressing the idea of a metaphorical death wish, will make sense to American, British or French people, but maybe not to person from Italy, for example, where fish is the traditional Christmas dish. Although metaphors are more common, some poets also make use of what is called conceptual synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon involving two sensory elements of our body. In practice, it can be found in formulations like “a loud-colored shirt”, which brings an aggressive, garish color to mind. Another way for words on paper to activate our sense of hearing is to make use of certain sounds. For example, a poet can render the noise of water by using words such as splash, splatter, spill! The study of linguistics shows that this is only one example of several groups of letters that refer to a specific sound. However, they won’t necessarily evoke the same sound in every language, and could be lost in the process of translation.