Translators on rendering poetry across four alphabets

Six translators working across four different alphabets describe a consistent pattern in their work on poetry: rhythm and sound almost never survive a change of script intact, while imagery and structure usually can be carried across with care.

Several describe rebuilding a poem's sound entirely in the target language rather than attempting a literal transfer, treating the original's rhythm as a constraint to satisfy anew rather than a pattern to copy.

All six agreed that the hardest cases are poems where the script itself is part of the meaning — visual wordplay, calligraphic form — which by nature has no equivalent in a different alphabet at all.