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).
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.
This translation certainly seemed strange to reviewers, who with rare exceptions criticized it in the most damning terms. And the sense of strangeness was measured, not surprisingly, against the canons of fluent translation, which several reviewers formulated so as to make clear its origins in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Grosseteste Review, an English magazine usually sympathetic to modernist poetics, Hugh Creighton Hill found fault with the Zukofskys’ Catullus because it violated the domesticating translation method favored by Johnson: “According to Samuel Johnson the duty is one of changing one language into another while retaining the sense, hence the main reason [to translate] would be to present the meaning of an otherwise incomprehensible writer in recognisable terms” (Hill 1970:21). In Arion, an academic journal devoted to classical literature, Burton Raffel echoed a string of English translation theorists from Dryden to Tytler when he suggested that translating Catullus required “(a) a poet, and (b) an ability to identify with, to almost be Catullus over a protracted period” (Raffel 1969:444). Raffel {221} praised Peter Whigham’s 1966 Catullus for achieving the domestication that Denham and Dryden recommended: “it is recognizably like what Catullus might have said, had he been alive and well in London” (ibid.:441). Raffel’s valorization of transparency permitted him to appreciate only those instances in the Zukofskys’ version where the illusionistic effect of authorial presence was the strongest; and again the terms of his praise recalled countless English commentators on translation during the Enlightenment: “Zukofsky’s rendering [of 2a] is easy, graceful; it has an air of confidence, and it warms to the touch as you read it over and over” (ibid.:437). In the Poetry Review, Nicholas Moore agreed with Raffel—and the humanist assumptions of their Enlightenment forebears: “To really get the spirit of an original postulates a kinship of temperament and even style over and beyond time, language, nationality and milieu” (Moore 1971:182). Moore also judged the Zukofskys’ version against the eighteenth-century reception of Catullus’s poetry, praising “the essential simplicity” of the Latin texts while inadvertently showing the domestication at work in this reading with a comparison to several English poets: Catullus, Moore felt, is “a sort of mixture of Herrick and Burns with the sharpness of Pope and freedom of the Restoration thrown in here and there” (ibid.:180). These comments demonstrate quite clearly that even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the centuriesold canons of fluent translation continued to dominate Anglo-American literary culture.
The fact is that the Zukofskys’ Catullus posed a cultural threat to unsympathetic reviewers, driving them to make explicit, extreme, and somewhat contradictory statements about the value of transparent discourse. In the literary magazine Chelsea, Daniel Coogan, a teacher of foreign languages at the City University of New York, asserted that he “can find little to praise in this translation” because “it is an essential principle of poetry that it be clear” (Coogan 1970:117). In the New Statesman, the English poet Alan Brownjohn praised James Michie’s recent version of Catullus as “a performance of immense lucidity and pace,” while attacking the Zukofskys’ as “knotted, clumsy, turgid and ultimately silly” (Brownjohn 1969:151). The demand for immediate intelligibility was so intense in the reviews that words like “gibberish,” “unreadable,” and “mad” get repeatedly applied to the Zukofskys’ translation. For Robert Conquest writing in Encounter, to take their project as “seriously” as they did “is to feel the chill wind from the abysses of unreason” (Conquest 1970:57).
{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).