obligations at once, and he acts, he imitates, he travels out of his world and out of himself in order to grow and to help his whole world grow as well. And all while staying faithful to his father. Translation is not, in short, about being constant, but about the constant balancing of obligations in the form of action. The fidelity metaphor, accepted by most reviewers, editors, and even most translators, is at best incomplete, at worst a front for the castration of a performer or an excuse for the performer’s irresponsibility, and in most cases not very helpful. The metaphor does not allow translators to determine and confront their various obligations, to be free, active, truly ethical artists. It puts them in the position of a traditional woman with one-way obligations to something that is metaphorically both husband and father. It cramps creativity, it makes translators feel like failures, and it denigrates the translator, and translation, in the public eye. And since no one agrees what it is about the original that one has to be faithful to — content, form, spirit, effect — the fidelity metaphor provides little actual guidance. It’s simply there and cannot be ignored. So I won’t ignore it; I’ll suggest replacing it with another, related metaphor: polygamy.
Bigamy has already been raised as an alternative to fidelity, by Barbara Johnson in a 1985 essay entitled “Taking Fidelity Philosophically”:*
[W]hile both translators and spouses were once bound by contracts to love, honor, and obey, and while both inevitably betray, the current questioning of the possibility and desirability of conscious mastery makes that contract seem deluded and exploitative from the start. But what are the alternatives? Is it possible simply to renounce the meaning of promises or the promise of meaning? . . . the translator ought, despite or perhaps because of his or her oath of fidelity, to be considered not as a duteous spouse but as a faithful bigamist, with loyalties split between a native language and foreign tongue. Each must accommodate the requirements of the other without their ever having the opportunity to meet. The bigamist is thus necessarily doubly unfaithful, but in such a way that he or she must push to its utmost limit the very capacity for faithfulness.
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