venuti

216 The Translator’s Invisibilitytranslation is obviously more opaque, frustratingly difficult to read onits own and only slightly easier if juxtaposed to a transparent versionlike Martin’s.The opacity of the language is due, however, not to the absence ofmeaning, but to the release of multiple meanings specific to English.Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1990) describes such effects of homophonictranslation as the “remainder,” what exceeds transparent uses oflanguage geared to communication and reference and may in factimpede them, with varying degrees of violence. As at least onereviewer of the Zukofskys’ Catullus realized (the classicist SteeleCommager), homophonic translation is an analogue of a modernFrench cultural practice, traduscon, translating according to sound, amethod that always results in a proliferation of ambiguities(Commager 1971). In the Zukofskys’ version, the Latin word “dicit,”from dicere, a verb meaning “to say,” is rendered homophonically asthe English “dickered,” which carries some of the sense of “say” if it istaken as “haggled” or “bargained,” but which in this erotic contextbecomes an obscene colloquialism for sexual forms of intercourse. Thesequence “my love air” translates “mulier” (“woman”), but thehomophonic method adds the English word “air,” and this sets goingmore possibilities, especially in a text that skeptically compares thewoman’s profession of her love to wind. “Air” also puns on “ere,”introducing an archaism into a predominantly modern English lexiconand permitting a construction like “my love, ere my own, would marryme.” The pun on “air” bears out Lecercle’s observation that theremainder is the persistence of earlier linguistic forms in current usage,“the locus for diachrony-within-synchrony, the place of inscription forpast and present linguistic conjunctures” (Lecercle 1990:215). Heacknowledges the foreignizing impulse in these effects by comparingthe homophonic translator to the speaker for whoma foreign language is a treasury of strange but fascinating sounds,and the speaker is caught between the urge to interpret them, thepervasive need to understand language and the fascinated desire toplay with words, to listen to their sound, regardless of theirmeanings.(ibid.:73)The Zukofskys’ homophonic translation didn’t “interpret” the Latinwords by fixing a univocal meaning, easy to recognize. But they did“listen to their sound,” and what they heard was a dazzling range of