The concept of translatability implies that every translator does know and have his/her own theory of translation, and keeps revising it as and when he/she realizes that there is a need for a revision. Beaugrande mentions it in his Factors in a Theory of Poetic Translating (1978), and promotes practice driven theories (Beaugrande, (1996) rather than abstract prescriptive theories. Most conscious translators try to achieve as much as possible and try to go as close to the original as they can. The translator's effort seeks to maintain the secret essence of the source language and the poem, as well as its structural aspects. Whereas some theorists like Beaugrande assign translatability to the translator ability, others like the Italian poet and translator Italo Calvino trusts that every language has its 'secret essence', and his concept of its translatability is that of its international communicability, which is quite different from Beaugrande's.

Calvino's American translator, Mr. William Weaver believes that a translation should not be approached as a scientific task, but as a creative endeavour. According to Weaver, knowing the author better would help a translator in translating their works more than a theory of translation could (Guarnieri, 2001). My experience in translating Emily's poems agrees with Weaver's. Before starting the actual translation activity, I read through at least half a dozen biographies of Emily Dickinson.

In my own translations, I have tried to achieve the best possible effects and retain the essence of each poem in question while translating it into the target language Marathi, making the poems more audience based (Beaugrande, 1996) with regard to cultural aspects. The paper,from here on, presents three aspects of my own translation experience with reference to Emily Dickinson's poems, namely, linguistic, cultural and managerial.

Translating Emily Dickinson has been an uphill task, not for me alone, but for poets and translators like Paul Celan, (A Jew survivor of the Holocaust), who is himself a notoriously difficult poet to translate (Franklin, (2000). Walker, (1998) writes: "…could we have the peculiar grammar of Emily Dickinson besides the lyricism of Baudilaire if both poets were constrained to the same language? However, such richness provides difficulty for those who are called upon to translate poetry from one language to another…". However, I am not aware of many other translators trying their hand at Emily's poems.

Emily Dickinson is unarguably one of the greatest and most unusual poets in the history of American literature. At the same time, she is a very difficult poet to understand and interpret, due to the strange punctuation practice, which makes her syntax incomprehensible in many places. Especially, for the purpose of translation, into a language such as Marathi, which is typologically, as well as culturally so different, Emily's poems pose formidable challenges.