The Translator’s Invisibility

Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
     quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
     in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.

My woman says there is no one she’d rather marry
     than me, not even Jupiter, if he came courting.
That’s what she says—but what a woman says to a passionate lover
     ought to be scribbled on wind, on running water

(Martin 1990:xxiv)

Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all
     whom but one, none see say Jupiter if she petted.
Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man too
     in wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water.

(Zukofsky 1991, no. 70)

Although both versions could be considered paraphrases that give a fair estimation of the Latin sense, the Zukofskys’ homophonic {216} translation is obviously more opaque, frustratingly difficult to read on its own and only slightly easier if juxtaposed to a transparent version like Martin’s.

The opacity of the language is due, however, not to the absence of meaning, but to the release of multiple meanings specific to English. Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1990) describes such effects of homophonic translation as the “remainder,” what exceeds transparent uses of language geared to communication and reference and may in fact impede them, with varying degrees of violence. As at least one reviewer of the Zukofskys’ Catullus realized (the classicist Steele Commager), homophonic translation is an analogue of a modern French cultural practice, traduscon, translating according to sound, a method that always results in a proliferation of ambiguities (Commager 1971). In the Zukofskys’ version, the Latin word “dicit,” from dicere, a verb meaning “to say,” is rendered homophonically as the English “dickered,” which carries some of the sense of “say” if it is taken as “haggled” or “bargained,” but which in this erotic context becomes an obscene colloquialism for sexual forms of intercourse. The sequence “my love air” translates “mulier” (“woman”), but the homophonic method adds the English word “air,” and this sets going more possibilities, especially in a text that skeptically compares the woman’s profession of her love to wind. “Air” also puns on “ere,” introducing an archaism into a predominantly modern English lexicon and permitting a construction like “my love, ere my own, would marry me.” The pun on “air” bears out Lecercle’s observation that the remainder is the persistence of earlier linguistic forms in current usage, “the locus for diachrony-within-synchrony, the place of inscription for past and present linguistic conjunctures” (Lecercle 1990:215). He acknowledges the foreignizing impulse in these effects by comparing the homophonic translator to the speaker for whom

a foreign language is a treasury of strange but fascinating sounds, and the speaker is caught between the urge to interpret them, the pervasive need to understand language and the fascinated desire to play with words, to listen to their sound, regardless of their meanings.

(ibid.:73)

The Zukofskys’ homophonic translation didn’t “interpret” the Latin words by fixing a univocal meaning, easy to recognize. But they did “listen to their sound,” and what they heard was a dazzling range of {217} Englishes, dialects and discourses that issued from the foreign roots of English (Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French) and from different moments in the history of English-language culture.[6]