You might be wondering, What could an author possibly be unfaithful to? As I said, the artist is considered to have no obligations except to himself (although various constituencies will attack him for nonartistic acts and statements). The artist is a hero without a country; because he fights for himself alone, he can be a traitor only if he sells out, and even then a traitor only to those who care about such things and can tell the difference. This is not the place to set forth my ideas about an artist’s obligations, about his responsibilities to his culture, to ethical standards, to artistic standards. But I think it is worth wondering if there are such obligations. It is worth questioning the Romantic assumption that the artist is a demigod, a father who gives birth to a work of art that has no mother. Even Coleridge’s passive image of the author as Aeolian harp gives the author no obligations, no chance of being unfaithful.
When people write or talk about translation, fidelity is always either on the tip of the tongue or in the back of the mind. Some people talk about how important fidelity is, while others try to defend themselves, in advance, against the accusation of betrayal. But in the little world of literary translation, people spend most of their time trying to define it. Fidelity to what or to whom? To what aspects of the original? To what extent?
The question of fidelity in translation is at least as complicated as it is in love, so let me start by giving some background, some history. Throughout most of classical and modern history, the translator did whatever he wanted with the works he translated. This was true of the Romans, who took what they felt like taking from Greek culture and made it theirs. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “In those days, to translate meant to conquer.”* Zoja Pavlovskis has written, “[Writers] vied with one another in rewording, paraphrasing, amplifying, reinterpreting, condensing, parodying, and commenting on what their forerunners had produced.”* Roman translators did tend to be faithful in terms of form; they brought Greek poetic forms into Latin just as an American translator today preserves every single paragraph of a novel. But the Romans wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving out a stanza, or changing it radically to fit their own vision and taste, any more than most
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