Having been commissioned to translate a play based on the novel Shira by Nobel prize-winning writer S. Y. Agnon, the translator was confronted with an idiosyncratic and historically distinct Hebrew idiom which seemed to defy translation. She describes her perception of the limits of translatability of quasi-canonical texts and her attempt to choose an analogous English register from a paradigmatic list of seemingly unsatisfactory options. Notwithstanding the prevalence of an adequacy norm in the translation of such works, she explains her decision to opt for a style that lies midway between adequacy and acceptability. The particular considerations of theater translation, in which the text must be aurally comprehensible at once, are also discussed.