The famous Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats is an iconic figure in the literary and cultural pantheon of the 20-eth century. His literary works are attractive and yet extremely controversial for translators, being both highly poetic in form and essentially philosophical in meaning. This paper centers round the works of four translators of Yeats's poetry: two Ukrainian ones - Oleksandr Mokrovolskiy and Oleh Zuyevskiy, and two Russian ones - Grygory Kruzhkov and Anna Blaze, all chosen for the reason that their works demonstrate clear-cut interpretative strategies. From the viewpoint of translatability, Yeats' poetry is largely dependent on his philosophy, biography and unique symbolism, thus restricting the translator and requiring exegesis. Within the context of this paper exegesis means a single, immanent interpretation of the text that excludes its random, external explanation: genetic, historical, symbolic, mythological, allegoric or otherwise. The translator's exegesis is viewed as the initial intention to draw the meaning out of the source text's context - or at least an attempt to achieve a lucid understanding of the latter. Despite the theological associations that come with the term, the translator's exegesis in the paper is not a notion aimed to establish yet another canon or golden standard of translation. It is rather introduced to provide a shift from modern understanding of hermeneneutics as the interpreter's self-determination at the expense of the thing interpreted back to the Schleiermacherian notion of the interpreter reaching through symbolic conventions of the language/languages and understanding the ever unconventional Other. The translator's exegesis is about seeing the source work as the textualization of the author's subjectivity, not a dead dehumanized structure. Any author's literary heritage is a holistic entity with its own autointertextuality based upon a system of dynamic constants - metatropes. Metatrope (as explained by a Russian scholar N.Fateeva) is a textualized or conceptual invariant - image, idea, word, sound or trope - that occurs throughout a number of the author's works, thus uniting them. By studying and comprehending original metatropes the translator can achieve empathy with the author. However, as metaropes are partially text-based and closely connected to the source language itself, and translation deals primarily with the changes of the linguistic code, they are inevitably destroyed in the process of translation. On the other hand, the translator might consciously re-create, if partially, and re-form deliberately the original's metatropic elements from the source text.
