Fiction · Level 5 · 216 words

A Faithful Version

Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.

Halvard Sunde spent thirty-one years translating a single poet, and was praised, in the obituaries, for his fidelity. The word was chosen carefully by people who had not compared the two halves of his work.

He began as a literalist, like a man who distrusts his own taste. The early volumes read like sworn statements: correct, joyless, footnoted where the original had merely been strange. Critics called this rigor, and he accepted the compliment for a decade before admitting that he had produced an exact record of sentences and lost the poems entirely.

The later volumes were another matter. He cut a line that would not survive the crossing. He moved a season. Where the poet had used a proverb no reader here could hear, he substituted one they could, and defended the theft: the poem, not the sentence, was the unit of obligation. His publisher was uneasy. His readers were not; they wept in the right places, which is the only evidence available.

The irony arrived posthumously. A scholar, comparing the two periods, praised the early work as the honest one. Sunde had spent his second life discovering that faithfulness to a text and faithfulness to its effect are different loyalties, and the tribute he finally received belonged to the man he had stopped being.

Comprehension questions

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4 questions
1. Which statement best expresses the passage's central point?

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C. Sunde came to believe that being true to a poem's effect is not the same as being true to its words, and he was finally honoured for the approach he had abandoned.
The closing sentences name both halves: two different kinds of faithfulness, and a tribute that belonged to the man he had stopped being.

2. How did the critics respond to Sunde's early volumes?

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A. They called the exactness of the work rigor and praised it.
The second paragraph says critics called this rigor, and he accepted the compliment for a decade.

3. Why is the scholar's praise described as an irony?

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D. It honours the method Sunde judged a failure and abandoned, not the one he spent his second life defending.
Sunde had concluded that his early literal work lost the poems. Being praised for exactly that work reverses his own verdict on it.

4. In "The irony arrived posthumously," posthumously means:

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B. after the person's death
The passage opens with his obituaries and ends with a scholar assessing his completed career, so the praise reaches him only after he has died.

Source: Written for Fluency. Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.