A translator, the poet insisted, faces a choice that cannot be evaded and cannot be won. She may render the foreign poem word for word, preserving its literal sense while flattening the music that made it a poem in its own tongue; or she may chase that music into English, inventing rhymes and rhythms the original never had, and in doing so quietly author a new poem wearing the old one's name. The first path is often praised as faithful, yet the poet distrusted the word. A translation that reproduces every dictionary meaning while losing the reason anyone wanted to read the poem is, she argued, faithful only to the corpse. Fidelity, properly understood, is owed not to the words but to the experience the words once produced in their first readers—an experience the translator can honor only by taking liberties the literalist would call betrayal. This did not license invention without limit. The translator remained bound, she said, by an obligation the free adapter escapes: to return, again and again, to what the original actually did, and to justify every departure as a service to that effect rather than to her own taste.