Every translation is a small betrayal, and the honest translator admits it up front. A poem in Russian leans on sounds that English cannot reproduce; a pun in French dies the moment it crosses the Channel. The translator must therefore choose what to save. Fidelity to sound may cost fidelity to sense; fidelity to sense may flatten the music into prose. There is no neutral choice, no version that loses nothing. Yet from this impossibility comes a strange freedom. Because the perfect translation cannot exist, the translator is released from chasing it. She is free instead to make deliberate, defensible sacrifices—to decide, poem by poem, which loss she can bear. The reader who complains that something was lost has not caught the translator in a failure. He has merely noticed the terms of a bargain the translator struck knowingly, and would strike again.