The translation that chose

A translator meets a sentence with two possible readings and must pick one. The original keeps both. The translation cannot.

This is the central difficulty of literary translation and it is not solvable, only managed. Ambiguity is a resource in poetry: a word that means two things at once is doing work that no unambiguous word can do. Carried into a language where the two meanings belong to different words, the ambiguity must either be lost, compensated for somewhere else, or explained in a footnote that destroys the effect by naming it.

Translators describe the compensation strategy most often. A pun that cannot survive in one line is replaced by a different pun two lines later, so the reader's experience of wordplay is preserved even though no individual word corresponds. This is sometimes called unfaithful in detail and faithful in effect, and it divides opinion sharply.

The argument against is that it substitutes the translator's invention for the author's. The argument for is that the alternative — a literally accurate line with the life removed — is also an invention, and a worse one, because it pretends to be neutral.

What both sides agree on is that there is no position outside the choice. A translation that avoids deciding does not exist, and a reader who believes they are reading the original in another language is reading, in every case, a series of decisions made by somebody whose name is usually in smaller type.