Can a translation protocol be implemented for poetry? This paper scrutinizes this question from a set of contrastive analyses of poems by Emily Dickinson and some of their French translations. The attempt to set up global rules in the transcoding of poetry is thwarted by the nature of poetic language which resists semantic fixation, as evinced in Dickinson’s idiolect, plurivocal or even opaque, rich in neologisms, syntactic and referential games. However, specific strategies can be worked out to translate lexical and prosodic features. But such strategies don’t apply to the figural core of poetic language, namely metaphors. Testifying to a dialectic relationship between the speaker – the poetic persona – and the world, between the speaker’s representations and those shaped in fixed designations by socio-cultural conventions, metaphors invite us to redefine the notion of a translation protocol for poetry in terms of a “dialogical device” which puts forward semantic tension in the translation process.