medium · GRE Verbal

Passage: Translators of classical poetry face a choice that no ingenuity fully resolves. A version faithful to the literal sense of each line often flattens the music that made the original worth translating; a version that reproduces meter and sonority must, to do so, take liberties with meaning. The best translators do not pretend to escape this bind but choose which loss to accept, and their choice is itself a form of interpretation, a claim about where the poem's life resides. To judge a translation, then, is not to measure its distance from a fixed original but to ask whether the sacrifice it makes is the one the poem could best afford. The passage suggests that a translation should be evaluated primarily by:

1. How closely its word choices reproduce the literal meaning of the source text
2. Whether the particular compromise it makes is well suited to the specific poem
3. The degree to which it preserves the original meter without altering meaning
4. Its success in avoiding any loss relative to the original poem
5. The translator's stated theory of what translation should accomplish

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