Looking into books on translation studies can be a strange and alienating experience for someone whose translating activities have developed along the haphazard paths of circumstance, signposted only by a recurring sense of discovery. Discovery in the first place that translating a poem is a way to activate and concretise one’s interest in it. But discovery also, largely by trial and error, of individual solutions to individual problems: how to render this particular ambiguous word, this instance of a conventional poetic structure, this cluster of sounds. This paper is about how to solve translation problems. Every now and then, the author includes statements from translation theoreticians to support her point of view.