Streamlined for sure …

… The University Bookman: A Coat of Varnish. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

[Wilson] offers the platitude “my translation is, like all translations, an entirely different text from the original poem.” As always, the devil is in the adverb: is it really an entirely different poem? The ancients, in a rather brilliant meditation on translation, made the words for “following,” “imitating,” “interpreting,” and “translating” deponent, a technical term indicating that they occupied a middle ground between passive and active. Translating, whether Wilson likes it or not, is in some important sense passive: that is to say, the source of the action is largely—though not entirely—outside the translator.

Wilson does not accept this; and indeed goes on to mock this idea of faithfulness in general, claiming that the whole concept of a “faithful” translation is “gendered.” Since this is an obvious lie, I’ll stop her right there: there are, indeed, words in English that are gendered. Muscular male bodies frequently sport multiple curves, but English speakers do not call men with such bodies curvaceous, because that word is gendered. But “faithful to his wife” is just as idiomatic, in English, as “faithful to her husband” is. Not everyone values fidelity equally, as is obvious enough from looking at the world, but the concept is not “gendered.”