It is the author's aim in this article is to consider the role of the literary translator both as close reader of an original text and as creator of a new text which preserves essential characteristics of the original. Questions such as the intentions and choices of the original author will clearly play a large part in decisions on how to translate, and, using the notion of translation as interpretative use developed within relevance theory, the author argues here that a translator cannot avoid such questions, and must use clues in the style of the poem to provide answers. As an illustration she looks at a German poem about the Holocaust and consider how its central ambiguity can be rendered in English.