Although poet-translators rarely share details of their craft, Yves Bonnefoy is one notable exception. This article examines the ways in which Bonnefoy employs metaphors to elucidate both the role of the translator and the translation process. One is immediately struck by a group of metaphors Bonnefoy employs to describe the relationship between author and translator, all of which suggest friendship and intimacy and establish the translator as a privileged interlocutor. Another set of metaphors depicts the translator as an explorer. The translator journeys into the recesses of the poet's psyche, trying to decipher his thoughts in order to re-express them through another poetic language. A third set of metaphors suggests that translating is less about the original text and its author than about the translator himself. In these metaphors, Bonnefoy invokes the senses: he proposes, for example, that translating consists in feeding on the teachings of another poet. Last but not least, translation is, in Bonnefoy's words, an occasion for self-reflection, suggesting a self-oriented and narcissistic process. Ultimately, the metaphors used by Bonnefoy in his articulation of the translation process ask us to reconsider both the translator's role in the translation of poetry and the profound motivations that lie behind this enterprise.