The Translator’s Invisibility

O ram ridicule home, Cato, the jokes some
dig, now cool your ears so the two cock in—no.
Read: they quick, kid, almost as Cato, Catullus:
raciest ridicule it may not miss jokes.
{219} Prehended a mode of pupa, loon boy lay
crux on to her: and cog I, so placate Dione,
pro tale, o rig it all, me I cogged kiddie.

(Zukofsky 1991, no.56)

The narrow range of Martin’s modern lexicon is highlighted by his use of “swiving,” which here seems less the archaism that it is (Chaucerian) than a polite euphemism for sexual activity, comparable to “business” or “skewer.” The Zukofskys’ homophonic version again shifts abruptly between discursive registers, from contemporary slang (“dig,” “cool”) to pseudo-archaic construction (“it may not miss jokes”) to scientific term (“pupa”) to Elizabethanese (“cog”) to contemporary colloquialism (“kiddie”). These shifts are foreignizing because, in their deviation from transparency, they force the English-language reader to confront a Catullus that consists of the most extreme linguistic and cultural differences, including self-difference—a self-critical tendency that questions the source of his own amusement (the head-shaking phrase, “the jokes some dig”) and points to his own sexual excess, even suggesting a homoerotic relationship between himself and Cato (“they quick, kid, almost as Cato [and] Catullus”). This sort of selfconsciousness is so faint as to be absent from both the Latin (“ride, quidquid amas, Cato, Catullum”) and Martin’s version (“You’ll laugh if you love your Catullus, Cato”). Martin’s goal was the evocation of “the poet’s voice” (Martin 1990:xiii), and this meant a fundamental domestication that fixed a clear, modernized meaning in the Latin text by assigning Catullus the standard English dialect dotted with some slang; the Zukofskys’ goal of approximating the sound of the Latin led them to sound the many voices, standard and nonstandard, that constitute English speech and writing.

The discursive heterogeneity of the Zukofskys’ Catullus mixes the archaic and the current, the literary and the technical, the elite and the popular, the professional and the working-class, the school and the street. In its recovery of marginal discourses, this translation crosses numerous linguistic and cultural boundaries, staging “the return within language of the contradictions and struggles that make up the social” (Lecercle 1990:182), exposing the network of social affiliations that get masked by the illusionistic effect of transparency. And since the Zukofskys’ Catullus calls attention to the social conditions of its own English-language effects, it interrogates the unified appearance that English is given in fluent versions like Martin’s, showing instead that

{220} when we speak of “English,” we speak of a multiplicity of dialects, registers, and styles, of the sedimentation of past conjunctures, of the inscription of social antagonisms as discursive antagonisms, of the coexistence and contradiction of various collective arrangements of utterance, of the interpellation of subjects within apparatuses embodied in linguistic practices (schools, the media).

(ibid.:229)

The recovery of the marginal in the Zukofskys’ Catullus challenges the illusionism of versions like Martin’s, whereby a standard English dialect and the dominant translation discourse (i.e., transparency) come to appear the right choices for the Latin text, the means to establish a true equivalence. The Zukofskys’ translation shows, on the contrary, that these English-language cultural forms are not so much “right” as conservative, engaged in the maintenance of existing linguistic norms and literary canons and therefore exclusive of other cultural forms. The Zukofskys’ effort to admit the marginal makes their translation seem strange in English because it is abusive, not just of transparent discourse, but of the Latin text as well. For there can be no doubt that their version, no matter how “close” to the Latin, enacts an ethnocentric violence in its imposition of translation effects that work only in English, in an English-language literary culture.