The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 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:
Commend to you my cares for the love I love,
Aurelius, when I’m put to it I’m modest—
yet if ever desire animated you, quickened
to keep the innocent unstained, uninjured,
cherish my boy for me in his purity;
(Zukofsky 1991, no. 15)
[…] Could he, put to the test,
not sink then or not devour our patrimonies?
In whose name, in Rome’s or that of base opulence—
(ibid., no. 29)
No audacious cavil, precious quaint nostrils,
or we must cavil, dispute, o my soul’s eye,
no point—as such—Nemesis rebuffs too, is
the vehement deity: laud her, hang cavil.
(ibid., no. 50)
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