This paper focuses on the translation of poetry from the standpoint of its cultural and ideological content. The paper investigates the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, who provides an example of a poet whose works contain a wealth of cultural and ideological allusions. Given the importance of the sound of Mandelstam’s poetry however, poetic devices such as rhyme and metre, alliteration and sound symbolism, often erroneously seen to be divorced from the semantic content of the poem, must also be taken into account.