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224 The Translator’s InvisibilityUnited States. But she was not fond of the most daring modernistexperiments. Although her discussion included many translators, wellknownas well as obscure (Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, PaulBlackburn, W.S.Merwin), she totally ignored the Zukofskys’ Catullus,preferring instead to comment on the free, colloquial version ofCatullus 8 that Louis Zukofsky included in his volume of poems, Anew(1946). For Apter, what was valuable about this version was itsevocation of a familiar speaking voice, its illusion of transparency: “theeffect recreates Catullus’s pain as if he were alive today” (Apter1987:56). In line with many other reviewers and critics, she alsoprofessed greater admiration for Pound’s “Major Personae” than forthe interpretive translations in which he pushed his discourse toheterogeneous extremes. “His translation experiments are interesting,”Apter observed, “but not entirely successful” (ibid.:67).The standard of “success” here is fluent, domesticating translationwhere discursive shifts are unobtrusive, scarcely noticeable. Thus,Apter praised Blackburn’s Provençal translations because “hedevelops a diction in which both modern colloquialisms and deliberatearchaisms seem at home” (Apter 1987:72). But Pound’s version ofArnaut Daniel’s “L’aura amara” “is marred by pseudo-archaicexcursions” and “ludicrous” renderings, making it “sometimesmarvelous and sometimes maddeningly awful” (ibid.:70, 71, 68). Apterdefinitely shared part of the modernist cultural agenda, notably the“emphasis on passion and intellect combined.” And she went so far asto inscribe this agenda in Pound’s translations, calling his versions ofDaniel “Donne-like,” using T.S.Eliot’s reading of “metaphysical”poetry to describe an English-language translation of a Provençal textand then concluding, somewhat disingenuously, that it was Pound, notshe, who “has made a semi-successful comparison of Arnaut Danieland John Donne” (ibid.:71). The kind of translation Apter preferred,however, was not modernist, but Enlightenment, not historicist, buthumanist, lacking the distancing effect of the foreign, transparent. Shepraised Burton Raffel’s version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knightbecause “Raffel has a knack of getting his readers to identify with theemotions of the fourteenth-century characters,” who come to “seem alltoo human” (ibid.:64). 7IIIThe marginalization of modernism in English-language translationduring the postwar period limited the translator’s options and