There is a common Italian saying:
Tradurre è Tradire
Literally, it means “to translate is to betray”. It is a neat piece of wordplay whose full effect resists translation. In Italian, only a few letters separate tradurre from tradire. English can carry the meaning across, but not the linguistic resemblance that gives the phrase its sting.
Already, the saying has proved its own point. Something survived the journey into English, and something did not. Yet calling that loss a betrayal is too easy.
A translator seldom chooses between faithfulness and carelessness. More often, the decision lies between competing forms of faithfulness, such as meaning or music, clarity or ambiguity, the shape of a sentence or the response it was written to produce.
Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation has placed The Odyssey back in public conversation. The poem’s long life in English offers a particularly revealing way into this problem. Translation isn’t merely a matter of finding the closest available words, but of deciding what a text cannot afford to lose. What matters most will depend on its purpose, its audience and the consequences of being misunderstood.
Making that judgement requires restraint. A translator must recognise what can be adapted, what must remain exact and what the source does not give them permission to decide. Experience does not remove these limits. It makes them easier to recognise.
Odysseus, a Man of Many Translations
Every age seems to meet a different Odysseus.
Most English readers don’t arrive at Homer alone. A translator accompanies them, making quiet decisions about how the poem should move, how its hero should sound and what the opening line should reveal.
Much of that weight falls upon one Greek word: polytropos. Built around the idea of many turns, it can suggest wandering, versatility, cunning, changeability and a life repeatedly knocked off course. The Greek is spacious enough to hold all these possibilities. English asks the translator to choose.
Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century version begins with:
“The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d”
Pope brings wisdom to the foreground. His Odysseus enters as an accomplished hero, carried by the grandeur of heroic epics. Pope did not preserve Homer’s Greek metre. He made Homer sound like a great poet to eighteenth-century English ears. Even “Pope’s translation” is a simplification: Elijah Fenton and William Broome translated half of its twenty-four books within the same poetic design.
Robert Fagles sends the line down a different current:
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”
“Twists and turns” follow both the winding voyage and the mind of a man who survives through disguise, persuasion and tactical change. Fagles’s expansive free verse gives the poem a strong spoken pulse, sometimes favouring momentum and oral performance over the compression of Greek.
Finally, there is Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which opens with six direct words:
“Tell me about a complicated man.”
Whilst “complicated” makes the book feel modern, Wilson’s account of Odysseus depicts him as unresolved. He may be brilliant, deceptive, resourceful, selfish or all four at the same time. Wilson’s strict iambic pentameter and decision to match the Greek line count demanded compression; one word had to carry a crowd of meanings.
Her version also demonstrates how translators inherit assumptions from previous translations. Wilson names enslaved people bluntly and avoids judgement about women that some predecessors introduced without support from the Greek.
Placed side by side, these openings make the translator’s hand unusually visible. Pope gifts Odysseus grandeur. Fagles offers him movement. Wilson leaves him unresolved. The man stays familiar, but the atmosphere around him has changed.
These contradictions do not insist on one version as accurate and another mistaken. Each account must still answer to Homer’s Greek. What matters is whether the translator understands what has been brought forward, what has receded and whether those choices can be defended against the source.
Literary translation places these decisions in full view. In professional translation, they are usually hidden inside documents whose readers may never know a choice was made at all.
What Cannot Be Lost in Translation?
The choices surrounding polytropos belong to literature, but the problem reaches far beyond Homer. Every text imposes its own hierarchy of fidelity. Some qualities must survive intact, while others can change as the text enters a new language.
Finding that order begins with understanding what the text is meant to do. A contractual clause intended to impose an obligation demands close attention to legal force. Information written for patients must remain accessible without weakening distinctions between what is possible, probable or confirmed. In each case, accuracy takes a different shape.
The most important meaning is not always contained within individual words. A short qualification can limit an entire statement. A repeated term can connect passages several pages apart. An ambiguity can reflect genuine uncertainty in the source. Smoothing away these features might produce fluent English, but it also changes the position taken by the original text.
This is why specialist translation requires more than confident phrasing. The translator reads the document, follows its internal relationships and recognises when the available context no longer supports a firm conclusion. At that point, the responsible choice is to preserve the uncertainty or raise a query.
Grammar, syntax and style will inevitably shift. The text’s purpose, degree of certainty and essential distinctions must remain. When they do not, the consequences can extend well beyond the wording on the page.
When Does Sacrifice Become Betrayal?
The boundary between necessary sacrifice and betrayal is also an ethical one. Translation scholar Christiane Nord describes loyalty as a responsibility towards the author, the client and the eventual reader. A text can be reshaped for a new language and audience, but the choices made must remain accountable to the source.
That boundary is crossed when convenience takes over. An ambiguity is settled without evidence. A qualification disappears in pursuit of fluency. Unfamiliar wording is softened until it produces an effect the original never intended.
Sound judgement leaves a trail. Queries preserve unresolved questions. Terminology records show why one rendering was chosen over another. Review gives a second specialist the chance to test those decisions before the translation reaches its reader. Interpretation becomes open to scrutiny rather than hidden beneath polished prose.
This still allows more than one faithful translation to exist. Pope, Fagles and Wilson follow different paths through polytropos because the Greek genuinely supports different emphases. Their choices can be challenged, compared and defended against the source.
Every translation loses something at sea. Fidelity lies in knowing what must reach Ithaca.
