Translation and Truth

I've been thinking a lot about translation lately, perhaps because I've been reading a lot of fiction translated from other languages (mostly French). Several times in the class in which the translated work was read, we have glanced over or mostly ignored the problems that must arise when this highly stylized experimental French or Italian fiction is rendered into English. A Spanish language edition of William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic has also just been announced and reviewed, and this translation of one of my favorite authors into a language I also (mostly) read makes me further consider the necessity of and problems with fiction and poetry translation. I have no doubt that translators are extremely skilled and often brilliant to be able to capture the ideas of any writer in a language not his own, but are they often brilliantly inventing their own works of art?

Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler somewhat whimsically tackles some issues that arise with translations. In the novel, you, the Reader, read parts of almost a dozen different novels translated from various languages in search of the ending to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. The enigmatic "translator" of the novel, Ermes Marana, is the character who could perhaps best be called its villain because he produces fraudulent and unauthorized translations of books with no apparent concern about their authenticity whatsoever. This character is an abuser of both good faith and ignorance, but is he also the closest of all of the novel's characters to being its true author? As the fringe groups searching for him ask, is there an absolutely true Ur-text, or an absolutely false one, and what's the difference? Furthermore, what am I to do with the fact that the entire novel has been further translated for me to consume?