The paper presents a contextual analysis of metaphor translation in literary discourse with reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (Castle Books, 2009). Due to its highly vivid imagery, this work of fiction raises a number of interesting issues in its translation. Quite a few distinguished Russian (Soviet) translators such as Vladimir Rogov, Irina Gurova, Mikhail Engelhardt, Konstantin Balmont, Vitaliy Mikhaluk, Nikolai Shelgunov attempted to translate this mystic piece of fiction. However, our focus is on how linguistic metaphors in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” were rendered into the target language by Irina Gurova and Konstantin Balmont. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” is considered to be a sophisticated complexity of technique, style, and meaning. Metaphor, being innovative, helps Poe to evoke and preserve the images and the atmosphere of suspense and mysticism, thus demanding from a translator all the skillfulness, knowledge and strategy to make the target text easier to understand, to adapt the translation to the target language conventions, to bring about the author’s message. In order to articulate this point, some examples have been drawn from a well-known translations of “Ligeia” by Irina Gurova and Konstantin Balmont.