I know what you mean, Janet. My son persuaded some of his friends to watch a dubbed version of his favourite British comedy, "The Office", on Italian MTV. Afterwards, he wondered why he had bothered; they all thought it was very feeble. Totò is equally untranslatable, despite being one of the great comic geniuses of the last century.
But these are special cases and it's simply not true that all verbal comedy (if we're limiting ourselves to that for the moment) is untranslatable. Woody Allen, for example, is hugely popular in translation. Indeed, I believe he's even bigger in France and Italy than he is in the US, even though a great many nuances must inevitably disappear.
To get back to poetry: Frost tells us, it can't be done, and he's right. I know that I'm not reading Attila Jozsef when I read one of Mike's translations - but I also know that it is as close as I'm ever going to get to reading him and I'm enormously grateful to Mike for the experience. And to a certain extent it has to be a matter of trusting the translator; I think one can usually tell when a translator feels his obligations fully enough. For example, when I read a Robert Lowell "imitation", I know damn well I'm reading Lowell and not a translation of Baudelaire or Rilke; it may be exhilarating but it's not, as you put it, in any sense a service to the original.
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