The Translator’s Invisibility

This translation certainly seemed strange to reviewers, who with rare exceptions criticized it in the most damning terms. And the sense of strangeness was measured, not surprisingly, against the canons of fluent translation, which several reviewers formulated so as to make clear its origins in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Grosseteste Review, an English magazine usually sympathetic to modernist poetics, Hugh Creighton Hill found fault with the Zukofskys’ Catullus because it violated the domesticating translation method favored by Johnson: “According to Samuel Johnson the duty is one of changing one language into another while retaining the sense, hence the main reason [to translate] would be to present the meaning of an otherwise incomprehensible writer in recognisable terms” (Hill 1970:21). In Arion, an academic journal devoted to classical literature, Burton Raffel echoed a string of English translation theorists from Dryden to Tytler when he suggested that translating Catullus required “(a) a poet, and (b) an ability to identify with, to almost be Catullus over a protracted period” (Raffel 1969:444). Raffel {221} praised Peter Whigham’s 1966 Catullus for achieving the domestication that Denham and Dryden recommended: “it is recognizably like what Catullus might have said, had he been alive and well in London” (ibid.:441). Raffel’s valorization of transparency permitted him to appreciate only those instances in the Zukofskys’ version where the illusionistic effect of authorial presence was the strongest; and again the terms of his praise recalled countless English commentators on translation during the Enlightenment: “Zukofsky’s rendering [of 2a] is easy, graceful; it has an air of confidence, and it warms to the touch as you read it over and over” (ibid.:437). In the Poetry Review, Nicholas Moore agreed with Raffel—and the humanist assumptions of their Enlightenment forebears: “To really get the spirit of an original postulates a kinship of temperament and even style over and beyond time, language, nationality and milieu” (Moore 1971:182). Moore also judged the Zukofskys’ version against the eighteenth-century reception of Catullus’s poetry, praising “the essential simplicity” of the Latin texts while inadvertently showing the domestication at work in this reading with a comparison to several English poets: Catullus, Moore felt, is “a sort of mixture of Herrick and Burns with the sharpness of Pope and freedom of the Restoration thrown in here and there” (ibid.:180). These comments demonstrate quite clearly that even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the centuriesold canons of fluent translation continued to dominate Anglo-American literary culture.

The fact is that the Zukofskys’ Catullus posed a cultural threat to unsympathetic reviewers, driving them to make explicit, extreme, and somewhat contradictory statements about the value of transparent discourse. In the literary magazine Chelsea, Daniel Coogan, a teacher of foreign languages at the City University of New York, asserted that he “can find little to praise in this translation” because “it is an essential principle of poetry that it be clear” (Coogan 1970:117). In the New Statesman, the English poet Alan Brownjohn praised James Michie’s recent version of Catullus as “a performance of immense lucidity and pace,” while attacking the Zukofskys’ as “knotted, clumsy, turgid and ultimately silly” (Brownjohn 1969:151). The demand for immediate intelligibility was so intense in the reviews that words like “gibberish,” “unreadable,” and “mad” get repeatedly applied to the Zukofskys’ translation. For Robert Conquest writing in Encounter, to take their project as “seriously” as they did “is to feel the chill wind from the abysses of unreason” (Conquest 1970:57).