Question

In the mid-twentieth century, the literary theory known as New Criticism emerged as a dominant force in American scholarly circles, fundamentally shifting the focus of critical inquiry away from biographical, historical, and sociological contexts and toward the "text itself." A cornerstone of this movement was articulated by Cleanth Brooks in his seminal essay, "The Heresy of Paraphrase." Brooks argued that the essential meaning of a poem is inextricably bound to its formal structure—its meter, imagery, paradoxes, and specific diction. To attempt to extract a prose summary or a core "message" from a poem, Brooks maintained, is to commit a critical heresy, because the poem's meaning does not exist independently of its intricate linguistic articulation.

While New Critics were often accused by later structuralist and historical scholars of treating literature in a vacuum, Brooks and his contemporaries did not view themselves as isolating the text from human experience. Rather, they believed that the specific formal tensions within a poem—how its contradictory impulses are resolved through irony and ambiguity—reflect the complexities of human experience more accurately than any didactic summary could. For instance, in analyzing John Donne's metaphysical poetry, Brooks demonstrated that the jarring juxtaposition of spiritual and physical imagery was not a mere stylistic flourish to be paraphrased away, but the very mechanism by which the poem's unique cognitive payload is generated.

However, a strict adherence to the heresy of paraphrase presents acute theoretical challenges when attempting to translate poetry across languages. If a poem's meaning is entirely dependent on the specific sonic and semantic properties of its original words, it follows that a translated poem must logically become an entirely new work rather than a faithful restatement of the original. Consequently, some modern translation theorists, while acknowledging Brooks's warning against reductive summaries, argue that a functionalist approach—which seeks to replicate the emotional or cognitive effect of the original text even if it necessitates altering formal elements—is necessary to prevent cross-cultural literary isolation.

Based on the passage, which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred about how a strict adherent to the "heresy of paraphrase" would view the translation of a poem into another language?