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.
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]
To signify the foreignness of Catullus’s poetry, then, Louis Zukofsky not only sought to bend his English into conformity with the Latin text and the diverse materials Celia provided him; he also cultivated the discursive heterogeneity that distinguishes modernist translation, releasing the remainder in language, recovering marginal cultural forms to challenge the dominant. Many of the English texts are cast into a sixteenth-century poetic language, distinctively Elizabethan, even Shakespearean. This includes isolated words—“hie” (no. 51), “hest” (no. 104), “bonnie” (no. 110)—but also substantial sections that evoke the blank verse of English Renaissance drama:
There are also strains of an eighteenth-century elegance (“perambulate a bit in all cubicles” (no. 29), “darting his squibs of iambs” (no. 36), “tergiversator” (no. 71), a modernist, Joycean experimentation (“harder than a bean or fob of lapillus” (no. 23), “O quick floss of the Juventii, form” (no. 24), and a scientific terminology taken from biology and physics (“micturition” (no. 39), “glans” and “quantum” (no. 88), “gingival” (no. 97)). Last but not least in effect is a rich {218} assortment of colloquialisms, some British (“a bit more bum” (no. 39)), most American, chosen from different periods in the twentieth century and affiliated with different social groups: “side-kick” (no. 11), “canapes” (no. 13), “don’t conk out” (no. 23), “collared” (no. 35), “faggots” (no. 36), “moochers” (no. 37), “hunk” (no. 39), “amigos” (no. 41), “sub-urban” (no. 44), “con” (no. 86), “bra” (no. 55), “hick” (no. 55), “kid” (no. 56), “mug” (no. 57), “homo” (no. 81). In the homophonic context created by the Zukofskys’ translation method, individual words echo, becoming nodes of different dialects and discourses. In no. 70 (quoted on p. 215), “say” can also mean “for the sake of argument,” “for example,”or even be a clipped form of the archaic “save”; “see” can be an abbreviated form of “you see.” These possibilities give a punchy, colloquial turn to the phrasing, gangster lingo with an Elizabethan archness: “Newly, say, dickered”; “none, see, save Jupiter.” A line in no. 17—“your lake’s most total paludal puke”—sounds like a 1950s teenage hipster. There is even a trace of black dialect (“pa’s true bro” (no. 111), “they quick” (no. 56)), most pronounced in one of the strongest translations:
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.
[6]
I have learned much about the language of the Zukofskys’ Catullus from Guy Davenport’s brief but incisive essays, 1970 and 1979. See also Gordon 1979 and Mann 1986, who presents an astute discussion of the cultural and political issues raised by the translation.