century, and became institutionalized in the nineteenth century. And this attitude remains institutionalized in America today, except among a small, disrespectful avant garde.
The contemporary American view of fidelity to the content of the original is accepted with as little question today as the Roman translators’ fidelity to Greek forms, the English Renaissance translators’ use of classic works to push their Protestant, rationalist agenda, Dryden and Pope’s turning everything into heroic couplets, or Voltaire’s imposition of classical rules on Shakespeare. Since translators stopped imposing Victorian morality on the works they translated, American translation has pretty much settled down to the fidelity of an old couple: even though there aren’t really any more temptations to stray, the concept is as strong as ever.
After all this history, translators have settled on the ethical standard of fidelity rather than alternative political or aesthetic standards. Here is what a few translators have said.
Richard Sieburth: “You have been entrusted with something very important, and very often this may be the only translation this text is ever going to get, and you better damn get it right. . . . I see this as a responsibility. You’re all the more responsible in that it’s your work, but not your work. You can be totally irresponsible about yourself. Here, you get into family, kinship relationships, or marriage. There is an unspoken contract that you develop with the text.
Eliot Weinberger: “You have to work from a position of total humility toward the original, and assume that the original author is always right. And you’re wrong.
Richard Wilbur: “[The translation] has to work in a faithful way. There wouldn’t otherwise seem to me to be any reason not to have written one’s own poem, and there wouldn’t seem to me any reason to put the name of the victimized author of the original to the translation.”*
Fidelity involves contractual and familial responsibility, trust, humility, and decency. Fidelity is ethical, which means that the alternative, infidelity, is unethical.
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