Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/95

 The Obligations of Polygamy

The greatest Western literary work on the theme of fidelity is Homer’s Odyssey. In the Odyssey there are three characters who are faithful to Odysseus in very different ways:

Argus, his dog; Penelope, his wife; and Telemachus, his son. For Odysseus himself, as for the creative artist, fidelity is not an issue. Argus simply waits, survives until his master comes back, and then he dies. He represents the maker of trots, who simply gives the meaning of the original. He exists totally for the sake of the original.

Penelope cleverly finds a way to allow herself to be faithful to Odysseus in the usual, matrimonial meaning of the word. She weaves every day and unweaves every night, while promising her suitors that she will marry one of them as soon as her weaving is done. It is she, the one with the most clear and simple obligations, who is considered the symbol of fidelity. Her fidelity, however, takes a clever but narrow, repetitive, and rather absurd form, rather similar to that of the slavishly faithful translator, who solves the problems but stays too close to the original to create an equivalent work.

Telemachus is the only one of the three who has multiple obligations: to his mother, to his father, to his island, to himself. Unlike the others, he does not even know his father, so the obligation to him is weaker than the others’. Yet it is he who acts on his fidelity to his father by going out to find word of him. He doesn’t simply lie around, like the dog, or come up with a ploy, like his mother; he takes his own odyssey, he speaks and acts cleverly like his father, and eventually he becomes his father’s ally, to save his island, to save his mother, and to find himself. Telemachus, who is not generally considered an example of fidelity, is the true representative of the translator, because he fulfills all of his 95