Well to be halfway fair, translating poetry is a fucking art in itself. You have to understand how to convey pace which works differently in different languages.

Like Spanish has long sentences, German has long words, etc. If you directly translate English to Spanish then it’s going to sound really punchy and abrupt and if you directly translate German into English it’s going to become very verbose.

But the issue here is the guy cant read the originals. So how the fuck can he know what the original pace and feeling is supposed to be? He’s writing fan fiction.

But to the broader concept of translating prose, actually that’s an amazing field in itself. The best translators of poetry are multilingual poets because they have to rewrite the poems to get the same feeling as the original, and sometimes the best translations are actually quite distant from a direct transcription of the original.