The purpose of this article is to place free verse in a variety of briefly visited translational situations in order to understand not only why free verse is peculiarly adapted to translational processes, but also what such processes can suggest to us about free verse's relationship with its own rhythmic resources, and what implicit suggestions translation makes about free verse's further development. Underlying this enterprise is the belief that free verse peculiarly provides translation with the wherewithal to discover rhythmic continuities between different languages, simply because free verse, perhaps as its defining characteristic, positively frees rhythm into a multidimensionality that it does not enjoy in regular verse, where, frequently regarded as a variation of metre, it is bound to metre's monodimensionality (syllable and accent), at the cost of other paralinguistic features: duration, pausing, tempo, loudness, tone, and intonation. It is these paralinguistic features that promote rhythm as an experience of the reading consciousness rather than as a feature of textual structure--a shift of emphasis that free verse itself engineers; for the translator looking to translate the phenomenology of reading rather than the interpretation of text, looking to capture reading as a multisensory, whole-body experience, as I am, the paralinguistic performance of rhythm is paramount. Histories of free verse and of its origins (e.g., Steele 1990, Scott 1990, Kirby-Smith 1996, Peureux 2009) are important because they give us a clearer view of the multiple sources of free verse's inevitability. But there is the danger that they will cast free verse indelibly as postregular (postmetrical) (or in the French case, post-libere) rather than as prototabular (postlinear) and that, in so doing, they will encourage us to think of free verse as unmetrical, or non-metrical, rather than as demetrified. (1) There is the concomitant danger that commentators will busy themselves with the development of a typology of free verses, that is to say, of certain formal blueprints, toward which, or away from which, particular poems will gravitate. This maps out free verse's task as the continued, albeit involuntary, fulfillment of certain transcendental Gestalts, whereas the whole purpose of the break with regular verse might be supposed to be the maximization of verse-immanence and of nonteleological polymorphousness. From time to time (Lowes 150-51; Silkin 7), it is said that while regular verse enjoys the bivocality of metre and rhythm, free verse has only rhythm. But while for Lowes this observation has a lightly depreciative intention, Silkin begins to see what free verse's consequential opportunities might be: Dispensing with metricality, it is not enough to make a non-metrical poem. Such poetry must redesign the resources released in non-metricality so as to produce something vital (41). This remark has a double significance for translation: first, it begins to indicate the sense in which free verse can act as an ideal instrument of translation: free verse must justify itself by constantly redesigning verse-resources, by relocating expressive energies, which in turn involves reconfiguring the structural dynamics by which the source text (ST) is delivered to the reading consciousness, and thus the reader's perceptual posture toward it. Furthermore, part of the reconfiguring of perceptual posture is the broadening of rhythmic possibility; since rhythm, as we have said, no longer functions, as so often in regular verse, merely as metrical variation, bound to metre's monodimensionality (syllable and accent), it can come fully into its own as a multidimensional principle, expanding its area of operation to all the other paralinguistic features of verse-making. Let us make no mistake: whereas metre is principally embedded in the linguistic, rhythm has its natural home in the paralinguistic; whereas metre is embedded in text, rhythm is a manifestation of readerly play with text. …