Passage A:

The translator who worships the literal word betrays the very text she claims to serve. A poem is not a sequence of dictionary equivalences but an event - a particular shock of meaning delivered to a particular audience in a particular tongue. When Homer's first hearers thrilled to a familiar epithet, they felt not the quaint archaism a modern reader detects but the warm authority of the expected. To render that epithet with fussy literal precision today is therefore to falsify it, for the same words that were transparent to the Greek ear now interpose a screen of scholarly strangeness. The translator's true fidelity is owed to effect, not to lexicon. Her task is to ask what the original did to those who first received it, and then to do the equivalent thing to readers who inhabit a wholly different linguistic world. This will often require boldness that the timid mistake for license: recasting a metaphor whose vehicle has gone dead, substituting a living idiom for one the centuries have fossilized, even sacrificing a literal image to preserve a rhythm or a joke. Such departures are not infidelities but their opposite. The reader of a great translation should feel what the original reader felt - surprise where there was surprise, ease where there was ease - and should never be made to stumble merely because the calendar has advanced. A translation that reads like a translation has failed; it has substituted the museum for the living voice.

Passage B:

There is a seductive humility in the claim that the translator should reproduce the effect of the original, but the humility is feigned. No one knows what Homer's first hearers felt; the evidence is gone, and what passes for reconstruction is usually the translator's own taste projected onto a silent past. To license bold departures in the name of equivalent effect is thus to license the translator to rewrite the author according to present convenience, all the while claiming a fidelity that cannot be checked. The alternative is not slavish literalism but a discipline of restraint. The foreign text is foreign; its idioms, its images, even its awkwardnesses belong to a world not ours, and a translation that smooths them into fluent contemporary prose does not bring the reader to the original - it conceals the original behind a flattering mirror. Better a version that preserves resistance, that lets the seams show, that reminds the reader at every turn that she is encountering something made elsewhere and otherwise. Such a translation asks more of its reader and grants her more in return: not the comfortable illusion that a distant author is her contemporary, but a genuine, and genuinely difficult, encounter with difference. Fluency is not a virtue when it is purchased by erasing the very foreignness that made the text worth translating. The translator's honesty lies in refusing to pretend that the gap between languages, and between ages, can be made to disappear.