Soru

The following passage discusses theories of literary translation.

For decades, the dominant paradigm in translation studies championed the ideal of 'transparency.' According to this view, a successful translation is one that reads as though it were originally written in the target language, effectively rendering the translator invisible. Proponents argued that any linguistic friction, syntactic awkwardness, or cultural opacity constitutes a failure on the part of the translator to fully smooth over the rough edges of the source text. This framework, rooted deeply in a utilitarian and commercial approach to global literature, evaluates translations almost exclusively on the metric of unencumbered fluency, assuming that the ultimate goal of translating a text is to assimilate it seamlessly into the target culture.

However, the translation of modernist poetry presents a formidable challenge to this transparency paradigm. Modernist poets intentionally fractured syntax, dissolved linear narratives, and deployed dense, geographically and historically specific allusions to disrupt the reader's passive consumption of the text. To translate such works with the goal of absolute fluency is, paradoxically, to fundamentally mistranslate their core aesthetic purpose. It strips the original of its essential, intended difficulty. In response, some contemporary literary theorists have argued for an approach known as 'abusive fidelity'—a translation methodology that deliberately forces the target language to stretch and bend to accommodate the alien syntax and rhythms of the original work.

To illustrate the necessity of this linguistic friction, one might consider the physical artifact of the medieval palimpsest. In early manuscript culture, a palimpsest was a parchment from which older text was laboriously scraped away to make room for new writing. Yet, the erasure was rarely perfect; faint but indelible traces of the original script remained visible beneath the new text, creating a layered, temporally complex, and multi-voiced document. A translation of a highly textured modernist poem should ideally function in a similar manner. Rather than presenting a pristine, unblemished surface that entirely obscures the source, the translation should allow the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the original to haunt the target text. The reader is thus constantly reminded that they are reading a mediated, hybrid work.

Detractors of this resistant approach maintain that deliberately opaque or clumsy translations alienate the general reading public, effectively restricting the audience for foreign literature to a small, insular circle of academic specialists. This concern regarding accessibility is not entirely without merit; translations that are excessively jarring or pedantic often fail entirely to convey the emotional resonance and underlying momentum of the original poem. Nevertheless, preserving the strangeness of the source text does not necessarily preclude aesthetic achievement. A masterful translator can carefully orchestrate the grammatical collisions between the source and target languages to create a new, distinct poetic rhythm—one that honors the deliberate difficulty of the original without sacrificing its fundamental artistic integrity.

Which of the following most accurately describes the author's primary argumentative strategy in the third paragraph?