The article deals with the language experiments of the famous Dutch impressionist poet Herman Gorter (1864-1927), particularly in his poem Toen bliezen de poortwachters (1890) which was translated into Russian by E. Vitkovsky in 1979. The poetical form, the atmosphere and the images of the translation correspond perfectly with the Dutch original, but Goiters experiments with the Dutch language, such as the use of extremely many composite neologisms, agrammatic forms and abnormal word combinations were omitted by the translator. The article shows that the Russian expressionist poets about 1900 (K. Balmont, V. Brusov) experimented with Russian in the same way as Gorter with Dutch, so that Russian translators can imitate these experiments while translating his poems.
