The paper examines Polish reception of the poem by Sergei Yesenin “The Black Man”. It attempts to intertextually analyze the work at the level of various kinds of analogies with Polish poetic texts, translated and original. The subject of comparative analysis is the content-formal aspects of translated texts. At the same time, the theory of translation, becoming a part of the comparative methodology, allows one to reach a broader level of generalizations, cultural projections, and socio-historical parallels. The study addresses a number of translations (W. Słobodnik, L. Podhorski-Okołów, W. Broniewski, A. Pomorski), illustrating the degree of freedom of interpretation of a literary text, proportion of congeniality as a special criterion of poetic correspondence. The very process of circulation, transfer, continuous cultural exchange of motives, lyrical situations between the texts of different national literatures and linguistic elements came to be an undeniably important aspect of artistry as a new quality of imagery and the birth of “explosive” poetic meanings. The issue of cultural transfer allows perceiving in individual translation versions mental worlds of the authors refracted in them, life-creating and biographical contexts, as well as historical collisions. In this case literary translation acts as a reliable tool, through which typological and comparative-historical comparisons of poetic worlds are carried out. Analysis of the micro-poetics of texts, motif structure and sensory layer appears more or less convincing on the way of studying reception and a broad intertextual field of selected works.