Translation and timelessness

Translating poetry raises various issues to do with the relationship between form and meaning, with linguistic and cultural relativity, and with the opposition between adapting the (foreign) world of the poem to the target audience and requiring the audience to enter that world. In this article I use the translation of poetry by German-Jewish poet Rose Ausländer to consider some of these issues as they affect, and are affected by, an apparent linguistic mismatch between English and German in the expression of time and uncertainty.