A translator faces a choice that no amount of skill can dissolve. She may render a poem word for word, preserving its literal sense while sacrificing the music that made it a poem in its own language; or she may recreate the music, inventing rhythms and rhymes that depart from the literal text. Purists insist the first path is the only honest one: anything else, they say, is not translation but composition, the translator smuggling her own art into another's work. This objection assumes that literal fidelity is a form of neutrality—that the word-for-word translator merely transmits, adding nothing. But every language carves the world differently. A word that is plain in one tongue may be archaic, comic, or clinical in another; to choose the 'literal' equivalent is already to choose among effects, already to interpret. The purist's neutrality is therefore an illusion: there is no vantage point outside interpretation from which a text can be simply passed along. This does not make all translations equal—some betray their originals more than others—but it dissolves the purist's sharp line between honest transmission and dishonest invention. Both translators interpret; they differ only in what they choose to preserve and what they are willing to lose.