One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.

Karl Kraus (1874–1936), the Viennese satirist and editor of *Die Fackel*, wrote repeatedly about the moral and aesthetic stakes of language—especially in journalism, propaganda, and literary style. In the multilingual Habsburg world and the early 20th century’s boom in mass media, translation was both common and politically charged. Kraus’s aphorism belongs to his broader polemic against the degradations of public language and his insistence that literary form is inseparable from meaning. By contrasting an “editorial” with a “poem,” he frames translation as relatively straightforward for utilitarian prose but radically difficult for art whose effects depend on the unique “skin” of its original language.

The quote argues that poetry’s essence is not a detachable “content” that can be carried over like clothing; it is embodied in the specific texture of its language—sound, rhythm, connotation, syntax, and cultural resonance. An editorial can be translated because its primary aim is propositional: to convey arguments and information. A poem, by contrast, is a linguistic organism; stripping it of its original words is like crossing a border without one’s skin—possible only by destroying what makes it alive. Kraus is not denying that translations of poems exist, but insisting that they are necessarily new works, approximations that cannot fully reproduce the original’s identity.