Artistic translation is not an exact mirror image of the original work but it is a creative hypothesis, because a different mental experience underlies the conceptualization of the world in a different language. Therefore a translator who aims to transfer the sense of a work (a world which is within and the ways of imagery) is forced to profile the meaning in a different way than the author did – on grammatical, lexical and stylistic level of language. This contribution consists of two parts. The first part examines the imagery process required for translating some particular expressions, metaphors and grammatical structures found in poems by Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. The second part presents the authors’ strategies for selecting poems to be translated, and editors for collecting poems by a given poet which ultimately may determine how the portrait of that poet appears in another country and culture.