This article is a comparative study of five translations of G. M. Hopkins’ “To Seem the Stranger”. All five fail to render the source text, and behind it the inner torture imposed on the poet by his allegiance to two contradictory imperatives, his rigid faith and his unremitting quest for beauty; the only possibility for the translator to pass on this stylistic drama directly to the reader being to force the same agrammatical extreme onto the target text as is borne by the source text.
