"Faithful, all too Faithful": Fidelity and Ring Stagings

Abstract

Fidelity: the very word carries the aura of virtue. Fidelity is defined as the quality of being faithful, whether it involves fidelity to one's spouse or “high fidelity,” the term long used to denote the accuracy of an audio reproduction to its source. But can too much fidelity be a bad thing? Anyone who has struggled through Wagner's prose writings as translated by William Ashton Ellis knows that Ellis's determination to render Wagner's idiosyncratic German in a style as close as possible to the original resulted in something barely comprehensible. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner's English-born son-in-law, wrote to Cosima: “I must talk to you some other time about Ellis's translations. I did not mean, as you appear to think, that they are not faithful; but they are not English. No Englishman who does not understand German can understand this Ellis-style. Ellis is faithful enough to the word—too faithful; but not to the sense.”1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.