קראו את הקטע וענו על השאלות: אמנות התרגום כבגידה נאמנה

The Italians compress the translator’s predicament into a pun: traduttore, traditore — translator, traitor. The accusation is unanswerable because it is true, and uninteresting unless one asks what, precisely, is betrayed. A literal rendering betrays the music; a musical one betrays the letter; and the translator who would betray nothing produces nothing, paralyzed between fidelities. The mature view, held by most working translators if not by their reviewers, is that translation is not the transfer of a text from one container to another but the writing of a new text under unusually strict instructions. The translator reads more slowly and more suspiciously than any other reader, weighing why this word and not its neighbor, whether a rhythm is a habit or a meaning, and then performs the work again in a language that never asked for it. Something is always lost; the cliché is correct. What the cliché omits is that something is also found. Languages refract rather than mirror one another, and a poem passed through that prism can acquire shades its author never commanded — an ambiguity unavailable in the original, a pun the new language donates unasked. The honest translator does not claim to have carried the cargo intact across the border. They claim something stranger: to have written the book the author would have written, had the author been someone else entirely.

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