Translation’s standing as literature is low. Even among the educated—who are not, today, the same as the cultivated and have limited acquaintance with other languages—it is thought of as a mechanical activity: the translator finds the word or phrase in his language that corresponds with the one in the foreign language and sets it down. Astonishment is the common reaction of such people when confronted with the wide disparities among translations of the same work. Astonishment is followed by some irritation and impatience; one is not getting what one bargained for: the original as it is in its own language but transferred to, duplicated in, one’s own. Maybe what’s needed is a super-computer. In its most prosaic function of passing along facts and information of every kind from one language to another, translation is indeed mechanical; in such translation, literalness and fidelity, here better called accuracy, go pretty much hand in hand. But in the translation of literary works, and especially of poetry, fidelity is a complex thing calling for the exercise of imagination, for transformation, not reproduction. A clarifying term has always been needed here. “Equivalence” is often used, but is, I think, too vague. I suggest “virtuality”: a faithful translation gives one virtually—that is, in effect but not in fact, not literally and never in all respects—the original poem.

However, it is not only the uncultivated who are dismayed to find that the best that translation is able to achieve in bringing over a poem from