Nearly everyone accepts the metaphor of fidelity. But fidelity to what? And why fidelity — personal, sexual, ethical — rather than something organic or artistic? And why is there not a recognition of the ambivalence we feel toward someone to whom we swear fidelity? When something is so widely accepted, and with so little reflection, it usually means that there’s something wrong with it, that there are questions that aren’t being asked, that it’s a matter more of power than of truth. In this case, it isn’t an imposed power, as in Catholicism or Communism, but the power of our culture, the power of the Romantic ideal of the author and of our interest in content over form.
But before I attack the concept of fidelity head-on, let me look at the question, Fidelity to what? To the content or the form? To the literal meaning of the words or their meaning as the translator interprets them, as Ezra Pound once wrote: “Tain’t what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over.”*
The distinction between form and content is one of the most controversial distinctions in writing. Like substance and process in law, or body and mind in philosophy, the distinction between form and content is central to many literary arguments, even when it’s in the background. Translation is certainly an area where this distinction is too rarely discussed openly, primarily because it complicates the apparently straightforward fidelity metaphor, which allows fidelity to content to be a given rather than an alternative.
As I said above, throughout most of literary history it was to the original poem’s form that most translators felt they owed their fidelity. But from the late seventeenth century on, form grew less and less important, and content reared its head higher and higher. Many Victorians aimed to be faithful to both form and content, usually with terrible to mediocre results, usually because of incompetence, often because of the fad for archaic language (as being more faithful to old originals), but sometimes simply because preserving the form did not preserve the effect that form had on the original’s readers. That is, a vibrant form often comes across in English as something sterile, without any associations, or even worse, with very different associations.
Then translators began to use the form they chose and to preserve as much content as possible. The most popular choice in
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