venuti

Margin 223With a sister so sweet and lovable,With a kindly uncle and such a large circle ofGirl-friends, why should he cease to look haggard?If he never touched any body that wasn’t taboo,You’d still find dozens of reasons why he should look haggard!(Moore 1971)Gellius is thin why yes: kiddin? quite a bonny matertom queued veil lanced viva, tom queued Venus his sistertom queued bonus pat ‘truce unk,’ tom queued how manyplenum pulletscognate is, query is his destiny emaciate?Kid if he only tingled not seeing what dangler’s there, honestcan’t he wish where thin sit maker envious.(Zukofsky 1991)In effect, Moore was recommending a wholesale Anglicization of theLatin text, down to using the most current English (“sexy”) anddiscarding the Latin name for a British-sounding one (“Coldham”).The Zukofskys’ version offered their estranging combination ofarchaism (“bonny”), Britishism (“queued”), American colloquialism(“bonus,” “unk”), and Latinate words, both popular (“viva,” as in“Viva Gellius’s mother”) and scientific (“plenum”). The discursiveheterogeneity stops the reader from confusing the English text with theLatin one, insists, in fact, on their simultaneous independence andinterrelatedness (through homophony), whereas Moore’s fluency blursthese distinctions, inviting the reader to take a domesticated versionfor the “original” and to ignore the linguistic and cultural differencesat stake here.The marginality of modernist translation projects like theZukofskys’ has extended into the present, both in and out of theacademy. Not only do the innovations of modernism inspire fewEnglish-language translators, but the critical commentary theseinnovations receive is shaped by the continuing dominance oftransparent discourse—which is to say that they are treateddismissively, even by the fledgling academic discipline of TranslationStudies. This is apparent in Ronnie Apter’s Digging for the Treasure:Translation after Pound (Apter 1987).Apter sought to distinguish Pound’s achievement as a poet—translator from that of his Victorian predecessors and then measure hisinfluence on later English-language poetry translation, mainly in the