venuti

Margin 217Englishes, dialects and discourses that issued from the foreign roots ofEnglish (Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French) and from differentmoments in the history of English-language culture. 6To signify the foreignness of Catullus’s poetry, then, Louis Zukofskynot only sought to bend his English into conformity with the Latin textand the diverse materials Celia provided him; he also cultivated thediscursive heterogeneity that distinguishes modernist translation,releasing the remainder in language, recovering marginal culturalforms to challenge the dominant. Many of the English texts are castinto 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 thatevoke 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, quickenedto 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, isthe vehement deity: laud her, hang cavil.(ibid., no. 50)There are also strains of an eighteenth-century elegance (“perambulatea 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 theJuventii, form” (no. 24), and a scientific terminology taken frombiology and physics (“micturition” (no. 39), “glans” and “quantum”(no. 88), “gingival” (no. 97)). Last but not least in effect is a rich