Apollinaire’s poem Zone is widely regarded as being representative of the kind of norm-violating innovations which mark the transition from symbolist to modernist modes of writing. Whether these avant-garde qualities of the French source text are retained in its translations into different languages, and thus into different cultural contexts with distinct poetic traditions and conventions, depends on factors which the author investigates in this article. By contrasting the poem’s history of translation into Dutch with its English and German translational reception, the author identifies problems besetting the transfer of ‘transitional’ – including norm-violating – literature into a target literature which is not, or hardly, in a state of transition. Comparative analysis of the translations into Dutch, English and German thus helps to identify significant cultural differences.