Stan,
I suspect you chose the word "axiom" carefully in
classifying the statement that anything that can be
said in one language can be said (possibly at much
greater length) in another. After all, if a bilingual
speaker says something can be said in one language but
not another, only other speakers of the same two
languages can argue, and then it's one person's word
against the other's. So it's an axiom like the aptly
named Axiom of Choice, which you can take or leave,
but some find it very useful to take it.
A Navajo woman used to tell me that some things can be
said (or make sense) in Navajo but not English, and
yesterday I heard the same claim about other Indian
languages on Native America Calling (a radio show).
Another example is a story from the essay "Poetry:
Lost in Translation?" that begins /Sappho to Valery:
Poems in Translation" (1971) by John Frederick Nims,
(which has a remarkable range of original languages).
Nims describes how at a dinner party a Japanese woman
tried to explain to him why Basho's frog haiku is "the
most celebrated of all haiku". After an hour she gave
up: "But you'd have to live in Japan!" Of course one
failure doesn't prove something can't be done, but it
raises the possibility.
Nims also disputes VN's statement in the /New York
Review of Books/ (Dec. 4, 1969) that "a poet's
imagery is a sacred, unassailable thing." He further
quotes "the Russian word, with its fluffly and dreamy
and syllables, suits admirably this beautiful tree."
He replies, "...suppose we called the tree a scab-bark
or a snotch." He gives other reasons to change
images:
He doesn't consider Nabokov's approach, namely
footnotes.
Unfortunately, Nims's translations aren't the best
arguments for his position that literal fidelty must
be sacrificed for rhyme, tone, connotation, etc. One
of his best additions, in my opinion, is in the last
line of his version of Goethe's /Fliegentod/.
(Limited preview, original on previous page.)
An outstanding howler is in /Natur und Kunst/:
Unfortunately, my other favorite disaster isn't available
in the Google Books view of this book, but as Nims says in
reply to VN, it's a change of weasels to minks (is that an
example of poshlost?) in a poem by Antonio Machado. The
weasels' connotations may have been wrong, but the minks'
are worse.
Jerry Friedman