For the last 2,000 years, metaphor has been the object of unending philosophical reflection and speculation, resulting in a very rich, prolific literature on the topic. The rise of text linguistics and cognitive linguistics has led to a renewed interest in metaphor in linguistic circles as well. In view of this, it is surprising that few attempts have yet been made to incorporate the rich theoretical knowledge about metaphor into the discourse on translation. Until the late 1970s, metaphor was even denied the status of a translation problem. After discussing briefly the characteristics of metaphors, this paper aims to throw some light on changes they can undergo in the transition from a literary source text (ST) to the target text (TT).