But even though both Fitts and Barnard joined in Pound’s valorization of linguistic precision, they were unable to share his interest in a more fragmentary and heterogeneous discourse—i.e., in a translation strategy that preempted transparency. Thus, Barnard ignored passages in Pound’s letters where he questioned her {213} adherence to standard English grammar (“utility of syntax? waaal the chink does without a damLot”) as well as her cultivation of a “homogene” language:
Fitts, in turn, praised Barnard’s Sappho because it was “homogene,” because it used “exact,” current English without any “spurious poeticism, none of the once so fashionable Swinburne—Symonds erethism”: “What I chiefly admire in Miss Barnard’s translations and reconstructions is the direct purity of diction and versification” (Barnard 1958:ix).
By the 1950s, Fitts had already reviewed Pound’s writing on a few occasions, gradually distancing himself from his early approval.[4] His negative review of Pound’s translations typified the midcentury reaction against modernism: he attacked the most experimental versions for the distinctively modernist reason that they didn’t stand on their own as literary texts. “When he fails,” Fitts wrote, “he fails because he has chosen to invent a nolanguage, a bric-a-brac archaizing language, largely (in spite of his excellent ear) unsayable, and all but unreadable” (Fitts 1954:19). Fitts revealed his knowledge of Pound’s rationale for using archaism—namely, its usefulness in signifying the cultural and historical remoteness of foreign texts—but he rejected any translation discourse that did not assimilate them to prevailing English-language values, that was not sufficiently transparent to produce the illusion of originality:
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.
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:
[4]
Fitts’s changing attitude toward Pound’s writing is documented by the two reviews printed in Homberger 1972, the first a very enthusiastic assessment of
[5]
The translation is reprinted, without the Latin texts, in Zukofsky 1991, where the dates of composition, 1958–1969, are given in square brackets. Cid Corman, who was in correspondence with Louis Zukofsky and published some of the Catullus translation in his magazine