The tone of a poem is indicative of the attitude of the speaker toward his/her reader, subject, or himself. The poet can modify the meaning of a poem through the subtle tonal variation which renders its tone serious, light, witty, dignified, playful, gay, sincere, grim, majestic, etc. This means that the proper understanding of a poem would be almost impossible of attainment without the exact grasp of its tone. Thus the misreading of the tone in the poetic translation inevitably leads to the mistranslation, which should be considered as a creation itself. This essay attempts to show how the tone of a poem can influence the poetic translation through some English translations of Chinese poems and English, Chinese, and Japanese ones of some Korean poems.
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