venuti

Margin 215meter of the Latin verse, and parsed every Latin word; using thesematerials, Louis wrote English-language poems that mimic the soundof the Latin while also attempting to preserve the sense and word order.The Zukofskys’ preface, written in 1961, offered a very brief statementof their method: “This translation of Catullus follows the sound, rhythm,and syntax of his Latin—tries, as is said, to breathe the ‘literal’ meaningwith him” (Zukofsky 1991:243). Refusing the free, domesticating methodthat fixed a recognizable signified in fluent English, the Zukofskysfollowed Pound’s example and stressed the signifier to make aforeignized translation—i.e., a version that deviated from the dominanttransparency. This foreignizing process began in their title, where theyretained a Latin version that possessed both a scholarly elegance andthe promise of a narrow, if not inscrutable, specialization: Gai ValeriCatulli Veronensis Liber (in a close rendering, “The Book of Gaius ValeriusCatullus from Verona”). One reviewer was moved to write that “theirno-English title offers to elucidate nothing” (Braun 1970:30).Below is one of Catullus’s brief satiric poems, done first by CharlesMartin, whose fluent translation explicitly adopts Dryden’s freemethod, and then by the Zukofskys, whose discourse is marked byabrupt syntactical shifts, polysemy, discontinuous rhythms:Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere mallequam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.My woman says there is no one she’d rather marrythan me, not even Jupiter, if he came courting.That’s what she says—but what a woman says to a passionateloverought to be scribbled on wind, on running water(Martin 1990:xxiv)Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me allwhom but one, none see say Jupiter if she petted.Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man tooin wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water.(Zukofsky 1991, no. 70)Although both versions could be considered paraphrases that give afair estimation of the Latin sense, the Zukofskys’ homophonic