The Translator’s Invisibility

True, Daniel wrote hundreds of years ago, and in Provençal. But he was writing a living language, not something dragged out of the remoter reaches of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary. He said autra gens, which is “other men,” not “other wight”; he said el bosc l’auzel, not “birds quhitter in forest”; and so on. Pound […] may have {214} “absorb[ed] the ambience,” but he has not written a “poem of his own”; he has simply not written a poem.

(ibid.)

Phrases like “living language” and “’poem of his own’” demonstrate that Fitts was very selective in his understanding of Pound’s translation theory and practice, that he did not share Pound’s interest in signifying what made the foreign text foreign at the moment of translation. On the contrary, the domesticating impulse is so strong in Fitts’s review that foreign words (like “autra gens”) get reduced to the most familiar contemporary English version, (“other men”) as if this version were an exact equivalent, or he merely repeats them, as if repetition had solved the problem of translation (“he said el bosc l’auzel, not ‘birds quhitter in forest’”). Like Davie, Fitts ignored Pound’s concept of interpretive translation, evaluating the Daniel versions as English-language poems, not as study guides meant to indicate the differences of the Provençal texts. And, again, the poems Fitts found acceptable tended to be written either in a fluent, contemporary English that was immediately intelligible or in a poetic language that seemed to him unobtrusive enough not to interfere with the evocation of a coherent speaking voice. Hence, like many other reviewers, Fitts most liked what Pound called his “Major Personae”: “We may look upon The Seafarer, certain poems in Cathay, and the Noh Plays as happy accidents” (ibid.). Fitts’s work as a translator and as an editor and reviewer makes quite clear that the innovations of modernist translation were the casualty of the transparent discourse that dominated Anglo-American literary culture.

These innovations were generally neglected in the decades after the publication of Pound’s translations. British and American poets continued to translate foreign-language poetry, of course, but Pound’s experimental strategies attracted relatively few adherents. And those poets who pursued a modernist experimentalism in translation found their work dismissed as an aberration of little or no cultural value. Perhaps no translation project in the post-World War II period better attests to this continuing marginality of modernism than Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s remarkable version of Catullus.

Working over roughly a ten-year period (1958–1969), the Zukofskys produced a homophonic translation of the extant canon of Catullus’s poetry, 116 texts and a handful of fragments, which they published in a bilingual edition in 1969 (Zukofsky and Zukofsky: 1969).[5] Celia wrote a close English version for every Latin line, marked the quantitative {215} meter of the Latin verse, and parsed every Latin word; using these materials, Louis wrote English-language poems that mimic the sound of the Latin while also attempting to preserve the sense and word order. The Zukofskys’ preface, written in 1961, offered a very brief statement of their method: “This translation of Catullus follows the sound, rhythm, and syntax of his Latin—tries, as is said, to breathe the ‘literal’ meaning with him” (Zukofsky 1991:243). Refusing the free, domesticating method that fixed a recognizable signified in fluent English, the Zukofskys followed Pound’s example and stressed the signifier to make a foreignized translation—i.e., a version that deviated from the dominant transparency. This foreignizing process began in their title, where they retained a Latin version that possessed both a scholarly elegance and the promise of a narrow, if not inscrutable, specialization: Gai Valeri Catulli Veronensis Liber (in a close rendering, “The Book of Gaius Valerius Catullus from Verona”). One reviewer was moved to write that “their no-English title offers to elucidate nothing” (Braun 1970:30).

Below is one of Catullus’s brief satiric poems, done first by Charles Martin, whose fluent translation explicitly adopts Dryden’s free method, and then by the Zukofskys, whose discourse is marked by abrupt syntactical shifts, polysemy, discontinuous rhythms: