A corpus of 93 compound adjectives appearing in the first five collections of poems published by Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), is analyzed with particular attention to their typographical, grammatical and semantic characteristics. How do such characteristics affect a French translator’s approach to compounds? The well-known partiality of Cummings for challenging linguistic convention forces the translator to view those compounds in a different light. It is indeed necessary to take into account the rhythmic, semantic, contextual and phonetic constraints that characterize Cummings’s poetry in order to translate. Relying upon the paramount importance played by Greek and Latin as foundational languages for Cummings, the article proposes to make the most of morphological derivation in French in order to translate the poet’s peculiar compounds.