Many scientific works are dedicated to translation. Some of them state that this process can be performed, the others consider the exact equivalents impossible, especially when they belong to literature, in particular to modernism. According to Gr. Rabassa, translation is a transformation, a form of adaptation making the new metaphor fit the original one, but not exactly copying it. Translation is in essence the closest reading of a text. The translator has to use not only his skills, but his instinct called by Ortega y Gasset “vital reason”. With time one’s instinct may give one some new ideas and thus the translation is never ended, and could continue perfecting to infinity. William Weaver, however, does not agree with the idea of an instinctive choice of a variant. He, on the contrary, believes that the translator should know the author’s work perfectly well, and only then start translating and choose different variants depending on that knowledge.  When word-for-word translation is not possible, the translator in many cases uses paraphrase. However, Friedrich Schleiermacher in his article showed that everyone admitted loss of splendor of a paraphrased work of art and thus understood the impossibility to treat a masterpiece freely, depending only on the translator’s wish. The person who takes the responsibility to translate a work of art should be inspired by its value and communicate its power to those who speak his/her own language.  The literary translation in such a way needs the most careful attention to totally different things: the implicit meanings of the words and phrases from the text, the sounding like that of the original, the significance of the work in general, the features of the original text that are traces left by its production, the signs indicating the literary genre and the style. It is especially difficult in case of rebellious texts as modernist fiction and poetry, because their form plays in majority of cases great role in the understanding of the meaning and needs to be close to the original while translating to keep the whole beauty.  In such a way, the translator is a creative writer who rises to the author’s challenge and transmits the connotative power of the masterpiece to those who do not share the same language, compensating for the losses in the cultural transfer. His task is enormous, for the reason that he brings the universal significant visions into his own cultural community.  Modernist literature represents a tremendous challenge for translation, especially if it is poetry. The reason for this is that the words chosen by the modernists are infinitely connotative and compose an aura, which is more significant for the texture of the creation than the conceptual content. Eliot, for example, uses a great number of words ending in “-sion” and their sound creates an effect that has to be rendered in translation. This sound is an integral part of the poem’s impact on the readers, and if it is lost, the complexity and mystery of the poem disappears as well. Without rendering the structural, musical and semantic interplay of images within the creation, its essence is dissolved.