The Translator’s Invisibility

{222} But the reviews also bear witness to the unreason of transparency. After earlier stating that “I am not so naive as to believe that I do not myself have theories of translation, too!” Raffel contradicted himself by concluding that “translation cannot be accomplished under the aegis of a theory, but only under the protection of the Muse, who will tolerate theory, who can make use of madness, but who cannot excuse failure to perform” (Raffel 1969:437, 445). Raffel questioned whether the Zukofskys’ translation “theory” had any use at all, whether aesthetic, scholastic or otherwise. Yet instead of rationalizing the use he found most desirable, he reverted to an anti-intellectual assertion of aesthetic value as self-evident, the mystifying Muse that transcends the limitations of time and space, the differences of language and culture. He, like Coogan and Brownjohn, was willing to license only that kind of translation “performance” that conceals its own assumptions and values with the illusionistic effect of transparency. Raffel’s antiintellectualism manifested itself, not merely in his preference for the sweeping judgment to the theoretically nuanced argument, but also in his rather naive assumption that transparent discourse truly represents the foreign text, or, indeed, the foreign author: “no one should have done this book: it does not perform, and it is neither translation nor Catullus” (ibid.:445).

Raffel’s concern about the use value of the Zukofskys’ work showed that he equated translation with domestication; their Catullus was foreignized, high in abuse value. The English reviewer Nicholas Moore similarly complained that the Zukofskys’ translation “doesn’t relate to the present in any real way” (Moore 1971:185), ignoring the contemporary lexicons on which it draws and failing to admit his own deep investment in a fairly standard dialect of English tilted toward Britishisms. He exemplified his privileged discourse by translating several of Catullus’s poems and publishing his versions with his review. Here is no. 89 done by him and the Zukofskys:

Gellius est tenuis: quid ni? cui tam bona mater
     tamque valens uiuat tamque venusta soror
tamque bonus patruus tamque omnia plena puellis
     cognatis, quare is desinat esse macer?
qui ut nihil attingat, nisi quod fas tangere non est,
     quantumuis quare sit macer invenies

Coldham is rather run-down, and who wouldn’t be!
With so kindly and sexy a mother,
{223} With a sister so sweet and lovable,
With a kindly uncle and such a large circle of
Girl-friends, why should he cease to look haggard?
If he never touched any body that wasn’t taboo,
You’d still find dozens of reasons why he should look haggard!

(Moore 1971)

Gellius is thin why yes: kiddin? quite a bonny mater
     tom queued veil lanced viva, tom queued Venus his sister
tom queued bonus pat ‘truce unk,’ tom queued how many plenum pullets
     cognate is, query is his destiny emaciate?
Kid if he only tingled not seeing what dangler’s there, honest
     can’t he wish where thin sit maker envious.

(Zukofsky 1991)

In effect, Moore was recommending a wholesale Anglicization of the Latin text, down to using the most current English (“sexy”) and discarding the Latin name for a British-sounding one (“Coldham”). The Zukofskys’ version offered their estranging combination of archaism (“bonny”), Britishism (“queued”), American colloquialism (“bonus,” “unk”), and Latinate words, both popular (“viva,” as in “Viva Gellius’s mother”) and scientific (“plenum”). The discursive heterogeneity stops the reader from confusing the English text with the Latin one, insists, in fact, on their simultaneous independence and interrelatedness (through homophony), whereas Moore’s fluency blurs these distinctions, inviting the reader to take a domesticated version for the “original” and to ignore the linguistic and cultural differences at stake here.