Conventional knowledge defines poetry as “what gets lost in translation.” The quote is from Robert Frost, and like many attributed quotes, it simplifies what he really said.
His actual statement, made in conversation with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, is that poetry is “that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.” Neither rendering can fully represent “the way the words are curved,” since a poem is closely tied to the sound patterns of the language in which it is written.
