The Translator’s Invisibility

To signify the foreignness of Catullus’s poetry, then, Louis Zukofsky not only sought to bend his English into conformity with the Latin text and the diverse materials Celia provided him; he also cultivated the discursive heterogeneity that distinguishes modernist translation, releasing the remainder in language, recovering marginal cultural forms to challenge the dominant. Many of the English texts are cast into a sixteenth-century poetic language, distinctively Elizabethan, even Shakespearean. This includes isolated words—“hie” (no. 51), “hest” (no. 104), “bonnie” (no. 110)—but also substantial sections that evoke the blank verse of English Renaissance drama:

Commend to you my cares for the love I love,
Aurelius, when I’m put to it I’m modest—
yet if ever desire animated you, quickened
to keep the innocent unstained, uninjured,
cherish my boy for me in his purity;

(Zukofsky 1991, no. 15)

[…] Could he, put to the test,
not sink then or not devour our patrimonies?
In whose name, in Rome’s or that of base opulence—

(ibid., no. 29)

No audacious cavil, precious quaint nostrils,
or we must cavil, dispute, o my soul’s eye,
no point—as such—Nemesis rebuffs too, is
the vehement deity: laud her, hang cavil.

(ibid., no. 50)

There are also strains of an eighteenth-century elegance (“perambulate a bit in all cubicles” (no. 29), “darting his squibs of iambs” (no. 36), “tergiversator” (no. 71), a modernist, Joycean experimentation (“harder than a bean or fob of lapillus” (no. 23), “O quick floss of the Juventii, form” (no. 24), and a scientific terminology taken from biology and physics (“micturition” (no. 39), “glans” and “quantum” (no. 88), “gingival” (no. 97)). Last but not least in effect is a rich {218} assortment of colloquialisms, some British (“a bit more bum” (no. 39)), most American, chosen from different periods in the twentieth century and affiliated with different social groups: “side-kick” (no. 11), “canapes” (no. 13), “don’t conk out” (no. 23), “collared” (no. 35), “faggots” (no. 36), “moochers” (no. 37), “hunk” (no. 39), “amigos” (no. 41), “sub-urban” (no. 44), “con” (no. 86), “bra” (no. 55), “hick” (no. 55), “kid” (no. 56), “mug” (no. 57), “homo” (no. 81). In the homophonic context created by the Zukofskys’ translation method, individual words echo, becoming nodes of different dialects and discourses. In no. 70 (quoted on p. 215), “say” can also mean “for the sake of argument,” “for example,”or even be a clipped form of the archaic “save”; “see” can be an abbreviated form of “you see.” These possibilities give a punchy, colloquial turn to the phrasing, gangster lingo with an Elizabethan archness: “Newly, say, dickered”; “none, see, save Jupiter.” A line in no. 17—“your lake’s most total paludal puke”—sounds like a 1950s teenage hipster. There is even a trace of black dialect (“pa’s true bro” (no. 111), “they quick” (no. 56)), most pronounced in one of the strongest translations:

O rem ridiculum, Cato, et iocosam,
dignamque auribus et tuo cachinno.
ride, quidquid amas, Cato, Catullum:
res est ridicula et nimis iocosa.
deprendi modo pupulum puellae
trusantem: hunc ego, si placet Dionae,
protelo rigida mea cecidi.

Cato, it was absurd, just too amusing,

fit for your ears & fit to make you cackle!
You’ll laugh if you love your Catullus, Cato:
it was absurd & really too amusing!
Just now I came across a young boy swiving
his girlfriend, and—don’t take offense now, Venus!
I pinned him to his business with my skewer.

(Martin 1990, no. 56)