Starting from the assumption that poetry is a communication between minds, mediated
by its style, I maintain that its translation should take into account both the way
poetic style reflects a cognitive state and also the cognitive effects of style upon the
reader.
Parks (1998) notes that the “divergence” of target from source text in translated
novels gives us access to the “vision” of the original writer. I consider whether such
divergence also applies to translated poetry.
Looking at translations of Wilfred Owen and Michael Hamburger into German, I
argue that the point of greatest divergence from the source text corresponds to what
Riffaterre (1959) called a “convergence”: a point in the text at which a number of
stylistic features come together, and I link these two concepts to the Chinese notion of
the “eye of the poem”. This is the point at which the concentration of stylistic features
such as repetition, ambiguity and metaphor allows access to the cognitive state informing
the poem and also gives rise to a concentration of cognitive effects.
The eye of the poem is not just a metaphor; and it can be located not only by
comparing target text with source text, as Parks does, but also by close stylistic analysis
of the original poem. It is essential to the way poetry communicates and thus, for
the translation to be not only a successful translation but also a successful poem, it
must both recognise the eye of the original and also itself have an eye.

Starting from the assumption that poetry is a communication between minds, mediated
by its style, I maintain that its translation should take into account both the way
poetic style reflects a cognitive state and also the cognitive effects of style upon the
reader.
Parks (1998) notes that the “divergence” of target from source text in translated
novels gives us access to the “vision” of the original writer. I consider whether such
divergence also applies to translated poetry.
Looking at translations of Wilfred Owen and Michael Hamburger into German, I
argue that the point of greatest divergence from the source text corresponds to what
Riffaterre (1959) called a “convergence”: a point in the text at which a number of
stylistic features come together, and I link these two concepts to the Chinese notion of
the “eye of the poem”. This is the point at which the concentration of stylistic features
such as repetition, ambiguity and metaphor allows access to the cognitive state informing
the poem and also gives rise to a concentration of cognitive effects.
The eye of the poem is not just a metaphor; and it can be located not only by
comparing target text with source text, as Parks does, but also by close stylistic analysis
of the original poem. It is essential to the way poetry communicates and thus, for
the translation to be not only a successful translation but also a successful poem, it
must both recognise the eye of the original and also itself have an eye.