The essays in this volume address one of the central issues in literary translation, namely the relationship between the creative freedom enjoyed by the translator and the multiplicity of constraints to which translation as process and product is necessarily subject. The contributors draw on a wide variety of genres, cultures and languages, maintaining a balance between the theory and the practice of literary translation. What emerges most clearly from these discussions is that the translator's task is subject to constraint and at the same time supremely creative. It is constrained not only by the original text but also by the different ways in which source and target languages encode reality, by target-culture ideological expectations and the functional non-equivalence of apparently identical poetic patterns. On the other hand, the translator creatively exploits the altered cultural, linguistic and literary context, thus realizing the different potential of the target language in an act of literary re-creation. This volume will be of interest to teachers, students and scholars of literary translation, as well as to practising translators who wish to inform themselves about issues of current concern.