A philologist devoted to translating a body of eleventh-century verse once confessed that her finished translations felt, to her, like elegant lies. The original poems relied on a single word that meant both 'ash' and 'inheritance,' so that a line ostensibly about a hearth going cold was, in the poet's own language, simultaneously a line about what children lose when a parent dies. No English word carries both senses, and so every translation forces a choice: render the hearth and lose the inheritance, or render the inheritance and lose the hearth. The philologist came to believe that her footnotes, cluttered with these forced choices, were not admissions of failure but the truest part of the translation—the only place where a reader could see the poem's full shape, negative space and all.