The translator had built her reputation on fidelity, on a near-religious refusal to smooth a foreign author's awkward sentence into elegant English. Readers praised her versions as "authentic," unaware that authenticity, in her hands, was itself a chosen style—one awkwardness selected from among several possible awkwardnesses, since no language maps onto another cleanly enough to make any single choice inevitable. When a young translator asked her how she decided which roughness to preserve, she laughed and said there was no method, only forty years of guessing which imperfection the author would have kept had he written in English himself. The guess, she admitted, was never verifiable. It was simply the guess she could defend.