“The poem is a bridge extending across time and encompassing all horizons,” writes the renowned Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani. It is through this bridge of poetry that he continues to traverse and speak to his Arab audience. In 1995, Qabbani published an article entitled, “Arabs bite the moon of poetry” in the Arabic daily journal Al-Hayat. The English version of this article later appeared at the end of Republic of Love: Selected Poems in English and Arabic under the title “How does Nizar feel about poetry translation?” Qabbani's article contains twenty rules ranging from his views about the translatability of poetry and particularly his poetry, his resistance to having his poetry translated into any language, and a discussion about what he expects from his translators. These rules, as well as his works of prose, such as My Story with Poetry, give us an insight into Qabbani’s theory of translation from his own perspective as the original author. Accusing his translators of murdering him, Qabbani approved of only two English translations of his poetry: Arabic Love Poems, translated by Bassam K Frangieh, and the aforementioned Republic of Love. As an homage to Qabbani - a master of metaphor in all his writings - this paper will compare Qabbani's poetry in its original Arabic to that of his English translators, who have and continue to strive to bring his foreign readers from one world and language into his own poetic garden. By using examples of his approved English translations, I will argue in this paper that the bridge of translation cannot function in the same way as Qabbani's bridge and that what prevents this bridge from succeeding is the deficiency of linguistic and cultural substances embedded in the text. This paper is divided into three parts: the first part will discuss why Qabbani, as a poet, resists the construction of a translation bridge; the second part will compare the original text and the translated text to demonstrate the incompleteness of the linguistic and cultural elements of the translation; the last part will use the Skopos theory to analyze the translators' intentions that on another level determined the translation’s outcome.