Interpreting Fidelity: Gatsby in Translation

Over the centuries, many metaphors have been used to represent the translation process but, certainly, as far as literary translation is concerned, one of the most apposite images would be that of the translator’s work as musical performance and, in particular, as improvisation on a theme associated with jazz. This parallel is perfectly fitting in the case of the multiple translations of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Now that the author’s original works have moved out of copyright and into the public domain, we find numerous ‘rival’ versions translated into the same language, as illustrated by the thirteen different Italian versions or the eight translations into French. This paper asks why we need so many versions, how they came about, and how they differ in their interpretations of the source text.