 The effort to translate a literary work from one language to another, to render the original work in a language not its own, involves a complex mixture of exposition and adaptation. Translational rendering is especially likely to resort to approximation and elaboration—paraphrase—when confronted by metaphors and other figures of speech. Yet it is often said that poetry is what’s lost in translation, to the point where Coleridge proposed “untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning” as “the infallible test of a blameless style” (Biographia Literaria, chap. 22). If metaphor is a form of poetry, it might seem to follow that paraphrase in words of the same language is impossible or uncalled for where metaphor is concerned. The American New Critic Cleanth Brooks argued as much in a famous essay called “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947).