The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Prehended a mode of pupa, loon boy lay
crux on to her: and cog I, so placate Dione,
pro tale, o rig it all, me I cogged kiddie.
Zukofsky l991, no.56)
Margin 219
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.
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