In this paper Holmes attempts to identify some of the impediments to appropriate decision-making in the process of creating a metapoem in one specific language, English, on the basis of a poem in another specific language, Dutch. He illustrates these by means of two examples: an English rendering of a poem by the Flemish poet Paul Snoek, and an English metapoem which is formally quite different from the Dutch original by Hubert van Herrewegen.