"Translation is always more problematic..."

"Translation is always more problematic and more simple than it seems. It is problematic because translation clearly cannot do what many people believe it proposes to do: it cannot move a linguistic something from one language and culture to another. It is not even a matter of losing something in the moving process — a 'noise' problem as information science would have it — it is a matter of losing everything in the process and they trying to reconstruct another language's and culture's impression of what the lost thing might have been. What is simple is that the translation is really a reading of a poem, a poem about a poem. 

"For this reason, an endless number of different translations are possible for any given poem—depending, of course, on what one wants to say about the original."

-- from Walter G. Andrews' Introductory Essay to Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology.