venuti

Margin 219Prehended a mode of pupa, loon boy laycrux on to her: and cog I, so placate Dione,pro tale, o rig it all, me I cogged kiddie.Zukofsky l991, no.56)The narrow range of Martin’s modern lexicon is highlighted by his useof “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 abruptlybetween discursive registers, from contemporary slang (“dig,” “cool”)to pseudo-archaic construction (“it may not miss jokes”) to scientificterm (“pupa”) to Elizabethanese (“cog”) to contemporary colloquialism(“kiddie”). These shifts are foreignizing because, in their deviation fromtransparency, they force the English-language reader to confront aCatullus that consists of the most extreme linguistic and culturaldifferences, including self-difference—a self-critical tendency thatquestions the source of his own amusement (the head-shaking phrase,“the jokes some dig”) and points to his own sexual excess, evensuggesting a homoerotic relationship between himself and Cato (“theyquick, kid, almost as Cato [and] Catullus”). This sort of selfconsciousnessis so faint as to be absent from both the Latin (“ride,quidquid amas, Cato, Catullum”) and Martin’s version (“You’ll laughif you love your Catullus, Cato”). Martin’s goal was the evocation of“the poet’s voice” (Martin 1990:xiii), and this meant a fundamentaldomestication that fixed a clear, modernized meaning in the Latin textby assigning Catullus the standard English dialect dotted with someslang; the Zukofskys’ goal of approximating the sound of the Latin ledthem to sound the many voices, standard and nonstandard, thatconstitute English speech and writing.The discursive heterogeneity of the Zukofskys’ Catullus mixes thearchaic and the current, the literary and the technical, the elite andthe popular, the professional and the working-class, the school andthe street. In its recovery of marginal discourses, this translationcrosses numerous linguistic and cultural boundaries, staging “thereturn within language of the contradictions and struggles that makeup the social” (Lecercle 1990:182), exposing the network of socialaffiliations that get masked by the illusionistic effect of transparency.And since the Zukofskys’ Catullus calls attention to the socialconditions of its own English-language effects, it interrogates theunified appearance that English is given in fluent versions likeMartin’s, showing instead that