Usefulness of the backtranslation process in poetry translation

The most frequent cause of backtranslation is the need for identifying trouble spots in the translated text in order to correct them. The target-text, retranslated into the original language is then confronted with the source-text. Many recent publications point out to the fact that the backtranslation should be considered as a helpful translator’s instrument rather than a threat. In the present paper the possibility of backtranslation of poetry is proposed. Could backtranslation be useful in case of literary translation? The discussion presented in this paper is based on the translations into Polish of a selection of poems by a modern Spanish poet Ana Maria Fagundo and their retranslations. The author refers to Anna Wierzbicka’s concept of cultural scripts and a universal semantic metalanguage in order to respond whether the presence of backtranslation is justified in the process of poetry translation.