omnipoetics:a_homophonic_translation

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====== A Homophonic Translation ======

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**//The Serpent and the Fire// (pp. 577-578)** \\
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Homophonic translation, is an attempt to retain as much of the sound as possible from the original. Whereas many translations focus on translating the meaning behind the poem, homophonic translation tries to align the new rendering of the poem as close as possible to the sound of the original. We saw an example of this in Robert Johnson's [[hellhound_on_my_trail | “Hellhound on My Trail,”]] where the lineated version and the inclusion of vocal sounds attempts to get closer to the sound and pacing of the original song.

In Lawrence Venuti's //The Translator's Invisibility//, he discusses the "illusion of transparency" in Anglo-American translation culture, which emphasizes fluent translation where a translator works to make their work 'invisible' and therefore, "producing the illusory
effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems “natural,” i.e., not translated" ((Venuti //The Translator's Invisibility// 5)). 
He continues to argue, "The translator’s invisibility can now be seen as a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated. An illusionism produced by fluent translating, the translator’s invisibility at once enacts and masks an insidious domestication of foreign texts, rewriting them in the transparent discourse that prevails in English and that selects precisely those foreign texts amenable to fluent translating...The translator’s invisibility is symptomatic of a complacency in Anglo American relations with cultural others, a complacency that can be described—without too much exaggeration—as imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home" ((//The Translator's Invisibility//17)). Continuing, he uses German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher lecture to explore two types of translation, domesticating and foreignizing. Domesticating translation seeks to create, "an ethnocentric reduction of
the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home," while the foreignizing method attempts, "an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad" ((//The Translator's Invisibility// 20)). Continuing he writes, 

<blockquote>
I want to suggest that insofar as foreignizing translation seeks to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation, it is highly desirable today, a strategic cultural intervention in the current state of world affairs, pitched against the hegemonic English-language nations and the unequal cultural exchanges in which they engage their global others. Foreignizing translation in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations.”

...Anglo-American culture, in contrast, has long been dominated by domesticating theories that recommend fluent translating. By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to English-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the very difference that translation is called on to convey ((Venuti 21-22)).

</blockquote>

Rothenberg's work highlights many translation techniques that work to fight back against the violent effects and cultural political practices of translation domestication. [[omnipoetics:total_translation_-_rothenberg|Total Translation]] underscores the attempt to remove translation from the dominating shadow of translation domestication and to provide new light and life to translation that can more fully attempt to encapsulate a more unified experience, for both the translator and the reader. Without the illusion of invisibility, the audience becomes illuminated to the ways in which translation can be fragmented and an incomplete experience. Rothenberg and Tedlock's exploration into this topic allows for one way to approach translation without, or at the very least less, of the Euro-centric violence of translations. 

"A Homophonic Translation," is another way that "modernist experiments with heterogeneous discourse" ((//The Translator's Invisibility//40)) worked as part of a foundational piece in the development of translation methods that rebutted the dominating culture of fluent translation. This poem, along with many other works in the SaF do the very work that Venuti advocated for, "The point is rather to elaborate the theoretical, critical, and
textual means by which translation can be studied and practiced as a locus of difference, instead of the homogeneity that widely
characterizes it today" ((//The Translator's Invisibility// 42)). 

=====The Zukofsky's "Catallus" =====

The first three lines are taken from //Catallus 8// of a Latin poem of 19 lines, written by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catallus. It is widely recognized for its initial notes ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incipit|incipit]]) and "limping iambs" or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choliamb|Choliambic verse]]. It is interesting to compare the Zukofskys' homophonic translation from another translation taken from this  [[https://www.vroma.org/vromans/hwalker/VRomaCatullus/008.html|source]] while noting the resonance of the Latin words with their version.
<blockquote>
<poem>
//MISER Catulle, desinas ineptire,// 	
Poor Catullus, it's time you should cease your folly,
//et quod uides perisse perditum ducas.// 	
And account as lost what you see is lost.
//fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,// 	
Once the suns shone bright on you, 
//cum uentitabas quo puella ducebat// 	
when you used to go so often where my mistress led, 
//amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.// 	
she who was loved by me as none will ever be loved. 
//ibi illa multa cum iocosa fiebant,// 	
There and then were given us those joys, so many, so merry,
//quae tu uolebas nec puella nolebat,// 	
which you desired nor did my lady not desire. 
//fulsere uere candidi tibi soles.// 	
Bright to you, truly, shone the days. 
//nunc iam illa non uult: tu quoque impotens,noli//	
Now she desires no more-; neither should you desire, poor madman,
//nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser uiue,// 	
nor follow her who flies, nor live in misery,
//sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.// 	
but with resolved mind, endure, be firm.
//uale puella, iam Catullus obdurat,// 	
Farewell, my mistress; now Catullus is firm;
//nec te requiret nec rogabit inuitam.// 	
he will not seek you nor ask you against your will.
//at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.// 	
But you will be sorry, when you are not asked for.
//scelesta, uae te, quae tibi manet uita?// 	
Ah, poor wretch! What life is left for you? 
//quis nunc te adibit? cui uideberis bella?// 	
Who now will visit you? To whom will you seem fair? 
//quem nunc amabis? cuius esse diceris?// 	
Whom now will you love? Whose will you be called? 
//quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis?// 	
Whom will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite? 
//at tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.//	
But you, Catullus, be resolved and firm.
</poem>
</blockquote>

The rhythm of the poem stresses on the last few syllables or beats, as suggested in the Choliambic style of verse. Louis and Celia Zukofsky carry the rhythm and melody of the original while also sticking to the poet's meaning in their translation. The words they carefully pick for the translation are not far off from the Latin words, as [[https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0003%3Apoem%3D8|Latin Word Study Tool]] suggests. 


==== Interpretation ====
Interpreting Catullus's poem is straightforward enough, the man is in love with a woman who leaves him. The woman in question was referred to with the pseudonym, //Lesbia//, and was a common subject or muse for the poet. She is identified as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clodia_(wife_of_Metellus)|Clodia]], who was also a poet but is remembered through the word written about her by Cicero and Catullus. Louis and Celia Zukofsky's translation understands the core of poem, in its raw yearning and defensiveness, as the poet heartbreak seeps through each line. 

<poem>
Now she won't love you; you, too, don't be weak, tense, null,
squirming after she runs off to miss her for life.
Said as if you meant it: obstinate, obdurate.
Vale! puling girl. I'm Catullus, obdurate,
I don't require it and don't beg uninvited:
</poem>

**Latinate vocabulary**

  * [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/obstinate|obstinate]]- Stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course, usually with implied unreasonableness
  * [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/obdurate|obdurate]]Stubbornly persistent, generally in wrongdoing; refusing to reform or repent.

Homophonic constraint pulls out the latinate vocabulary available in the English language. Despite the apparent feature of this poetic constraint to favor the Classic tongue of Catullus, the Germanic stretching of "love you; you, too" pulls the line longer than the rest, and makes the declaration "Vale!" ring with a curt reminder of the foreign registry of Catullus verse with the experimental verse of the twentieth century. 

The plain Reading of the poem lets the reader know that the dialect registers of Scottish G. S. Davies (from 1912), a more accessible accent to mimic or mock or play with in the phonic repository of a contemporary American English reader. The parallel of which a classics scholars might have out of reach in the word of linguaphobic speakers of English without a memory—alas, what I mean to write here is that the erudite flex of writing the homophonic translation from Latin to English might be lost, or at least raises questions on both the level of intellectual appreciation, aesthetic engagement, and legibility of the poem to a new readership. 

===== Some Notes on Translation =====
<blockquote>“Translation is a great boon to a poet. You never have to face the white page alone if you don’t want to. I think of translation as a special kind of deep reading.” (Stallings) </blockquote>

from //Catullus// by [[omnipoetics:zukofsky|Louis Zukofsky]] with Celia Zukofsky
{{:omnipoetics:catullus.jpg?300 |catullus gai valeri catulli veronensis liber}}

What do we do when the translation becomes so much a new text so separated from the original written by the Roman poet, Catullus (c.85-54 BC). Perhaps the translation should deviate the most from its source, its most immediate common ancestor, that the lineage is direct through source attribution, but the new original lacks or perhaps transcends the original purpose of creation unique to the original:
“one scholar, while refusing to cite it by name, describes it as presenting “a Catullus who seems to have stepped from the pages of Finnegans Wake” (Quoted in John Ferguson, Catullus, New Surveys in the Classics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 40.) Translation as commentary on the meaning of the poem depicted through a transcription of symbolic language from one symbol system to another, in the Zukofsky’s case, Latin to English, the written word, that is, the vocabulary along with the grammatical categories of knowledge that denote “Latin” as Latin and “English” as “Hey man, can you teach me about Catullus” rather than “He him ðæs lean forgeald!” 

Catullus is thus variously and simultaneously the poet of tender sentiment and scandalous mores: an edition published in Edinburgh in 1961 left out one third of the corpus on the grounds that it was “unfit for commentary in English”. The poems then present a particular challenge to translators, that of doing justice to uninhibited speech. (Eastman 3) 

What is the responsibility of the translator, the literary scholar, the reader, what is the point of uninhibited speech? 

This poem invites us to turn the critical gaze away from the autobiography of the author, or the subject of Catalus and his contemporaries as people in an anthropological or historical sense. [Signal phrase] “Translating Catullus, in the way that the Zukofsky’s propose to do it, is rather a way of holding the lyric subject at a distance, in the sense that voice arises here out of the application of a set of rules, a translation protocol” (Eastman 4). In other words, the poetic voice from the twentieth century has space to arise out of the distance between “author” and “translator” between “Latin” and “English”—a distance that distinguishes Catallus’s language, his literary latin as a distinct subject, in-part, but distinct from, the author and his time and his place; this decentered subject lets Zukofsky’s poetics take center stage. A reader who doesn’t give a hoot about Latin Classics can approach Zukofsky’s new literary creation, written in the genera of translation. 



=====External links=====
  * [[https://digitalexhibits.library.wustl.edu/s/Classic-Elements/item/31|Washington University’s Julian Edison Department of Special Collections: Classic Elements Catullus (1961)]]
  * [[https://z-site.net/celia-thaew-zukofsky-1913-1980/|Celia Thaew Zukofsky (1913-1980) Z-Site]]
  * [[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/uncategorized/50114/miss-her-catullus|Miser Catulle" / Zukofsky by AE Stallings]]

===== References =====
Eastman, Andrew. Estranging the Classic: The Zukofskys’ Catullus, Rendre étrange(r) le 
classique : le Catullus des Zukofsky, Revue Lisa, vol. 7, no. 2, 2009, pp. 117-129, https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.312
Link : https://journals.openedition.org/lisa//312?lang=en


Venuti, Lawrence. “Invisibility.” The Translator’s Invisibility, Routledge, New York, NY, 1995, pp. 1–42.

{{tag>New_York Objectivist USA Translation Modernist}}
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