In this sense, the answers to the first three questions I asked what is beyond the text, how we as translators get to it and how we recreate it in translation - all depend upon our view of what is still relatively unknown: the mind. While it might seem risky to stake so much on what we cannot see, it should be recalled that style has always, since the earliest discussions of Aristotle, been seen as a manifestation of mental processes or properties, or mental states. There is no other way to explain that style represents choice.

Not only the questions about what we do when we translate literature but also the question of what literature is and how its translation differs from that of non-literary texts depend upon a notion of mind. It is because, in the von Törne poem mentioned, we are reading a poem and not a newspaper, that we are prepared to allow both for the possibility of an ambiguous state of mind and for the poem's reflecting it. In this sense the differences between literary and non-literary texts reflect the extent to which we attribute importance to reading a mind into the text, to seeing the text as expressing feelings, attitudes and states of mind and allowing the reader to feel them, too.

But at the same time as we attribute a great deal of importance to the mind in a literary text we are also aware that we cannot be certain of having discovered its characteristics. If we were reading an actual newspaper account of Nazi atrocities, we would expect to be able to get at the opinion of the journalist (or newspaper) quite easily, perhaps using the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. But because it is a poem we can only say we have evidence for a particular state of mind: an ambiguous state of mind, as I suggest. And we cannot say whether this is the mind of the typical journalist or indeed the typical newspaper reader, or of a particular one, or of von Törne himself.

And the fifth question - the relation between universal and specific in literary (and other) texts-is also in part answered by realizing that the information our minds store is at once personal and specific to our own experiences and context, while also sharing some universal characteristics with every other reader's mind. The concepts of ambiguity, foregrounding, metaphor and iconicity which we have looked at in the previous sections are certainly universal. The notion of mind as embodied (Johnson 1987) also suggests such universality very strongly. But the notion of cognitive context emphasizes the importance of the individual. A translation would do well to recognize and honour both aspects. In Verdonk's words, interpretation is both subjective and "intersubjective” (1999:298).

As I stated that knowledge of style can help us to understand how style works in its relation to all the above questions and also to interpret stylistic features of the text. But it cannot give guarantees that we have arrived at a “согесt" reading because no such guarantees are possible, and because the nature of literature suggests there is no cоrrect reading. What stylistics aims to do is to explain how we get to the readings we intuitively arrive at. But readers can be naïve or critical, as many writers such as Fowler (1981) or Diaz-Diocaretz (1985:16) have pointed out. If a translator is a critical reader, a sense of how style works will be a useful tool. And while one might want to argue, as Pilkington does (2000:49), against description informed by theory, there can be no principled reason to take this stance to its extreme, simply because everything wedois informed by theory. Translation is no different.

What I have implicitly been arguing is that translation which is stylistically aware can make a more reasonable case for its interpretation of the source text than any other sort of translation can. It must do this in full knowledge that the translator's interpretation is only one among many. And if it is possible to convey the attitudes, emotions and interactional possibilities of the style of the source text, at least the translation will not close off too many possibilities.

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