Abstract: Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life has undergone repeated translation and interpretation. Choosing three representative versions for diachronic comparison, this study tries to clarify the misreading and mistranslation, examine the textual-grid evolutions, and discuss effects of both traditional and modern poetic forms adopted in translation. Attention is paid to the influence of aesthetic values and human ideals in different times and spaces on the way a text is translated, and how the cultural landscape connoted in the original poem is reconstructed in the target culture.