"And swear nowhere lives a woman true and fair. . ." It was John Donne who, most eloquently, devoted a number of poems to the (to some) incontrovertible fact that women cannot be at once beautiful and faithful. Not that much later, apparently, the idea was picked up by the French rhetorician, Ménage, in order to describe the conflictual relationship between the translation and its source text. The woman as metaphor, the translation as woman.