Then I recommended Anna Karenina to a friend and I started going over the pros and cons of the various translations when he stopped me and reminded me that Russian is his first language. That's when it clicked for me. It's like people who obsesses over which cut of a movie is the best, except in this case the "true" author's vision is available and many people can access it, just not them. I understand why people fixate on finding the "best" translation.
"The original was unfaithful to the translation."
BORGES AFFIRMED, in earnest, that an original can be unfaithful to a translation. He vehemently objected to claims that certain translations he admired are “true to the original” and derided the presuppositions of purists for whom all translations are necessarily deceitful in one way or another. Borges would often pro- test, with various degrees of irony, against the assumption – ingrained in the Italian adage traduttore traditore – that a translator is a traitor to an original. He referred to it alternatively as a superstition or pun. For Borges the Italian expression, unfairly prejudiced in favor of the original, is an erroneous generalization that conflates differ- ence with treachery. The idea that literary translations are inherently inferior to their originals is, for Borges, based on the false assumption that some works of literature must be assumed definitive. But for Borges, no such thing as a definitive work exists, and therefore, a translator’s inevitable transformation of the original is not necessarily to the detriment of the work. Difference, for Borges, is not a sufficient criterion for the superiority of the original.