On the Untranslatability of Poetry

Quite a number of scholars from western to eastern have been arguing about the question of translatability and untranslatability of poetry. Robert Frost, the well-known American poet once said,"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."Even though, practice of translating poetry has never ceased. This paper argues that poetry is untranslatable from the aesthetic point of view. Poetry's language function is to convey the aesthetic effect, thus the purpose of rendering poetry is to reach the aesthetic effect. However, aesthetic effect is based on its language form; the inerasable differences between languages determine that the translation of poetry is impossible, which tends to change language form of one language to another.