The Translator's Loyalties
Every translator is a critic; the disloyalty is in the choice of which loyalty to keep.
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The oldest insult thrown at translators — traduttore, traditore, translator, traitor — is also the most precise compliment. To carry a sentence across a border, one must decide what to declare and what to leave behind, and there is no crossing that smuggles everything through intact. The translator is accused of betrayal because betrayal is the work. The only real question is which loyalty to keep, since keeping them all at once is not on offer.
The Three Faithfulnesses
Consider a single line of verse. The translator can be faithful to its letter — the literal sense of each word, the dictionary meaning laid end to end. She can be faithful to its spirit — the thing the line is doing, its irony or tenderness or menace, even where that requires abandoning the literal words. Or she can be faithful to its music — the metre, the rhyme, the particular weight of vowels that made the line lodge in the ear of the people who first loved it.
These three loyalties almost never point the same way. A pun is loyal to the music and treacherous to the letter. A literal rendering is loyal to the dictionary and deaf to the song. To translate is to stand at a junction where three roads diverge and to know that whichever one takes, two friends will accuse you of having abandoned them. The translator does not solve this. She chooses, and a choice is an act of criticism — an argument, made in the only currency that counts, about what the poem most essentially is.
A translation is a reading that could not keep its opinions to itself and so was forced to write the whole book down again.
The Author Behind the Curtain
This is why the translator is a hidden author, and why the best of them are read like authors in their own right. We speak of Constance Garnett’s Dostoevsky or Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf not out of carelessness but because we sense, correctly, that a second sensibility has entered the room. The fingerprints are everywhere — in the choice of “doom” over “fate,” in a comma that turns a threat into a sigh — and they are not erasable. The fantasy of the invisible translator, the clean pane of glass through which the original shines undistorted, is exactly that: a fantasy. There is no glass. There is only another writer, working under a vow of self-effacement she cannot fully keep.
What we ask of her, in the end, is not invisibility but good faith — that her betrayals be principled, that she have a coherent argument about which loyalty matters most for this text, this line, this reader. The disloyalty we cannot forgive is the unconsidered one: the loyalty kept by accident, the road taken because it was easiest rather than because it was right.
For anyone tempted to think this a marginal craft, the history of translation is to a surprising degree the history of how ideas travel at all — which is to say, the history of how civilisations read one another, through a long succession of gifted, principled traitors, each keeping one loyalty and grieving the rest.