ABSTRACT
Even translators of poetry tend to agree that a "translation" of a genuine poem is no more than a variation. The late Joseph Brodsky tended to throw up his hands, Americans are told, at his own efforts to translate his own Russian into English. It often appears that publishers, schools, and university departments of literature that use translations and translators of imaginative works are engaged in a vast and profitable confidence game. Translators who once earned five cents a page can now command large sums and gain honors. Translation "centers" exist to soak up scarce funds, publishers earn money, and linguistically unqualified teachers lazily and unscrupulously assure their charges by their example that they need no language other than English. Americans would seem either arrogant in that assumption, perpetrators of linguistic nationalism, or victims of linguistic pudor, shame at being tongue-tied and inarticulate in another language.
