Menno Wigman caused a sensation as a poet and anthologist around the turn of the century, but at the start of his career he was primarily active as a translator. After throwing himself passionately into translating poetry for years (particularly 19th-century French Decadents such as Jules Laforgue, Jean Lorrain and Charles Baudelaire), one day he ‘simply stopped translating poems’. However small his body of translation work is (only seven published collections), it is significant, for the poets he translated share a strong affinity and exerted a profound influence on his own poetry. To understand Wigman the poet, it is important to delve into Wigman the translator: reason enough for an exploration.