According to Jirí Levy, representative of the generation of Czech structuralists, “the poetics of the translator can be reconstructed due to the traits (or deviations from the source text) that are repeated in it”. (Levy: 1969, 25) Based on these studies, it is proposed to present a comparative reading of two translations in Portuguese for the poem “Verfall” by the German expressionist Georg Trakl (1887-1914). One of the translations was performed by a Brazilian translator, Olivia Krahenbuhl, in 1960, under the title “Decadência”, and the other, entitled “Corrupção”, was made by the Portuguese translator Paulo Quintela, in 1981. The comparison between the two translations and their relations to the poem in German allow us to delineate the poetic conceptions of the two translators, and show how semantic and sound nuances, in a poem, are no longer understood as mere nuances, but as determinant sensory contents in the reception of the poetic text.