venuti

214 The Translator’s Invisibility“absorb[ed] the ambience,” but he has not written a “poem of hisown”; he has simply not written a poem.(ibid.)Phrases like “living language” and “’poem of his own’” demonstratethat Fitts was very selective in his understanding of Pound’stranslation theory and practice, that he did not share Pound’s interestin signifying what made the foreign text foreign at the moment oftranslation. On the contrary, the domesticating impulse is so strong inFitts’s review that foreign words (like “autra gens”) get reduced to themost familiar contemporary English version, (“other men”) as if thisversion were an exact equivalent, or he merely repeats them, as ifrepetition had solved the problem of translation (“he said el bosc l’auzel,not ‘birds quhitter in forest’”). Like Davie, Fitts ignored Pound’sconcept of interpretive translation, evaluating the Daniel versions asEnglish-language poems, not as study guides meant to indicate thedifferences of the Provençal texts. And, again, the poems Fitts foundacceptable tended to be written either in a fluent, contemporaryEnglish that was immediately intelligible or in a poetic language thatseemed to him unobtrusive enough not to interfere with the evocationof a coherent speaking voice. Hence, like many other reviewers, Fittsmost liked what Pound called his “Major Personae”: “We may lookupon The Seafarer, certain poems in Cathay, and the Noh Plays as happyaccidents” (ibid.). Fitts’s work as a translator and as an editor andreviewer makes quite clear that the innovations of modernisttranslation were the casualty of the transparent discourse thatdominated Anglo-American literary culture.These innovations were generally neglected in the decades after thepublication of Pound’s translations. British and American poetscontinued to translate foreign-language poetry, of course, but Pound’sexperimental strategies attracted relatively few adherents. And thosepoets who pursued a modernist experimentalism in translation foundtheir work dismissed as an aberration of little or no cultural value.Perhaps no translation project in the post-World War II period betterattests to this continuing marginality of modernism than Celia andLouis Zukofsky’s remarkable version of Catullus.Working over roughly a ten-year period (1958–1969), the Zukofskysproduced a homophonic translation of the extant canon of Catullus’spoetry, 116 texts and a handful of fragments, which they published ina bilingual edition in 1969 (Zukofsky and Zukofsky: 1969). 5 Celia wrotea close English version for every Latin line, marked the quantitative