AMONG ZUKOFSKY'S BETTER-KNOWN statements is his description of his poetics as "An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music" ("A"-12). I never took calculus, but I am guessing he means pure sound lies at one verge, pure discourse at the other, and poetry navigates in between. I further take this to mean Zukofsky is willing to come asymptotically close to sheer sound, if he feels like it. He is willing to approach the condition of music (as Walter Pater put it) as nearly as he can without actually reaching it. Zukofsky takes sound seriously.
Zukofsky's approach to translation, probably best known through his version of Catullus but also abundantly on display in the later sections of "A", reflects this seriousness about sound.
The old Saussurean distinction of signified and signifier was useful for me in thinking about this; for Ferdinand de Saussure, a word combined a sound or a written sign (the signifier) with a concept (the signified), so when I hear the sound <hors> or see the word "horse," I think of the tall, handsome animal that runs so well.
Translation typically renders the signified and lets the signifier fall away. If I were translating from French and came across the word cheval, I would translate it "horse," not "shove all," because the French word's signified is "horse," and the fact that the English phrase "shove all" sounds a lot more like the French signifier cheval than does "horse" doesn't matter. "Takyth the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille," as Chaucer's Nun's Priest says. The signified is the nourishing grain, the signifier the useless husk. Keep the grain, toss the husk.
But! As Zukofsky's poetics emphasize, sound matters in poetry, perhaps matters as much as semantic meaning.
So--thanks to Mark Scroggins for this example--when Catullus writes:
Argivae robora pubis
a signified-based translation would give us:
the flower of Argive strength
but Zukofsky gives us:
Argive eye robe awry pubes
which is "wrong," of course. Zukofsky is giving us much of the sound of Catullus, but little of the meaning. But he is also giving us poetry, I would argue, not the mustily Victorian English equivalent of Catullus's phrase, but something arresting, puzzling, maybe a little ribald...in short, something that makes the Argonauts pop into view a little bit, sound a little more like the lusty young troublemakers they perhaps were...and doesn't that seem closer to Catullus than "the flower of Argive strength" does?
Similar transmutations often in the closing sections of "A", apparently, not just from Latin but also from Hebrew, Welsh, Arapaho, and who knows what else. So one gets lines like "agog o league a-god ran-on" ("A"-23). Puzzling? Yes. Arresting? Yes. Poetry? I certainly would say so. And closer to poetry, I bet, than whatever the literal translation of the source phrase would be.
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