Lost in Translation? Maybe Not with Poetry

Poetry is more than words strung together. It consists of rhythm, memory, sound and soul. It’s also an act of translation, even when read in one’s native tongue. 

But when poetry crosses linguistic borders, it becomes something else entirely — a pursuit of feeling within language, sometimes incomplete but often profound. Since April is National Poetry Month, professors and students reflected on the importance of literature and poetry in different languages. 

Wenhan Zhang, an instructor in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program, said poetry across languages is less about understanding every word and more about tuning into a certain energy. He compared the feeling of connecting with a poem in another language to a “tick.”

When studying in school, Zhang said it was initially hard to connect to English poetry because he had a Chinese background and the cultural significance didn’t translate. He compared it to when he was studying French and Italian — something wasn’t clicking. 

But when he finally understood the feelings — not the meaning — of a poem, he said he sensed its importance.

“There’s a sense of a kind of inner feeling if you’re especially reading poetry or poems from different languages, different cultural backgrounds,” Zhang said. “There’s something that is coincidental, which is that it is very hard to explain. There should be a kind of a tick, a kind of epiphany when you are reading a certain poem from a certain language.”

Zhang, who speaks Mandarin and English and has reading knowledge of French, Italian, Latin and Japanese, is no stranger to the complexity of translation. He said while he appreciates the accessibility of translated poetry, he’s acutely aware of its limitations.

For Zhang, it’s nearly impossible to preserve the tonal effects in Chinese or Japanese, where accents and structure are integral to a poem’s meaning. In Chinese especially, characters create a visual harmony.

“Translation is just rubbish,” Zhang said. “You cannot preserve the compactness of the actions.”

He gave the example of a line by Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, in which an archer draws his bow and shoots a cloud, striking down two birds. Though the English retelling captures the meaning, it misses the elegant, condensed movement of the original Chinese — losing its vivid immediacy.

Rather than discouraging readers, Zhang said he wants them to see translation as a starting point — a gateway to discovery.

“Read poems in English translations and use that as a hook,” Zhang said. “Then maybe it will bring you somewhere you would never have imagined. Tiptoeing into another language is where something interesting might come.”

Cristina Lombardi, associate professor of Italian Studies, shares Zhang’s appreciation for poetry as a doorway to introspection. Lombardi said poetry is a sensory pursuit. 

“When we teach students literature in the original, what we’re really doing is exposing them to the most sensorial aspect of learning,” Lombardi said. “Languages do not all only convey meaning but they convey sound and they convey rhythm.”

For Lombardi, reading Dante in Italian focuses the emotional charge, speaking to the heart before it reaches the mind.

“One of the things that we learn from reading Dante is that he uses poetic language to express human preoccupations that are particularly difficult to express in any other way,” Lombardi said.

Similarly, Zhang said Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” is impossible to capture in translation. Zhang said reading the poem in Italian felt like entering a cultural dialogue across time — one where both the reader and writer share a linguistic framework.

A poem Zhang said is known by every Chinese individual is “水調歌頭 · 明月幾時有” — Prelude to Water Melody — How long will the full moon last?” It’s a poetic image of timeless communion, one that language makes visible.

In Chinese, the poem takes on a more cosmic dimension. Zhang said the motif of moon gazing connects the viewer to everyone who has ever looked at it before — past, present and future. This view is hard to capture in English.

“A young soul has not been hardened yet by life experiences and so it can be better open to the universal themes of poetic expression,” Lombardi said. “That’s the moment when we need to read poetry.”

Explaining ideas themselves can’t always be translated, she used the example of “ti voglio bene” versus “ti amo” in Italian. Both phrases roughly translate to “I love you,” but they carry different emotional registers. “Ti voglio bene,” Lombardi said, is a wish for someone’s wellness — a quieter, more selfless kind of love that can’t be fully explained without cultural context.

Shreeji Patel, a first-year molecular and cellular neuroscience major, said this nuance is something she also encounters in Gujarati, a Western Indian language. While English translations of Gujarati words may seem straightforward, they lack cultural connotations that give them power.

“Gujarati isn’t about language, it’s about the sense of surrounding,” Patel said. “There are phrases and words that you feel are so beautiful and cannot be translated into English. They can be translated linguistically, but the meaning loses itself.”

Even seemingly simple words like khoobsurat — beauty — or saras — good — carry emotional textures Patel said are inseparable from their cultural roots. The language’s oral and poetic traditions are central to how meaning is conveyed, according to Patel.

Patel said Gujarati is calming, like slipping into a familiar rhythm of thought.

 “There’s just a whole new feeling of being mesmerized when you understand the context of it,” Patel said.

Shaumika Pradhan, a first-year studying history and women’s and gender studies, said his connection to Bengali is rooted in both family and resistance.

“Bengali to me and to my parents is a very soft spoken language,” Pradhan said. “Whenever they talk with each other, it’s very soft spoken. It’s very lyrical.”

He said this softness makes Bengali a particularly powerful language for poetry. Even in moments of emotional intensity, speakers often switch to English to avoid disturbing the gentleness of Bengali, according to Pradhan.

Despite not speaking the language fluently, Pradhan uses Bengali imagery and history in his own poetry, drawing from personal and cultural memory. His first set of poems reflected on his grandfather’s death and his mother’s grief — a deeply traditional and spiritual moment.

“One of the traditions for Bengali is that we go to India and spread the ashes,” Pradhan said. “I talked about her journey and just how my grandpa was going to be cremated and his ashes were going to be spread to the Ganges River. I use poetry to talk about my culture, make references to it and also talk about. Though I don’t speak Bengali, I still try to incorporate its softness.”

Pradhan also emphasized how language and poetry can serve as tools for protest and reclamation, especially considering the historical context of Bengali being outlawed in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

Zhang said what unites different languages is poetry’s capacity to reach beyond logic, to gesture at what cannot be said outright. Though translation may not preserve every rhythm or every image, Zhang said it can spark the beginning of a journey.

“Maybe there’s something interesting coming after tiptoeing in another language,” Zhang said.