On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Alan Baker wrote:
> This may be true of Zukofsky's version of Catullus, which I've just been
> reading, but in that particular instance, it produces a very convoluted
> English. Yet I've been told that the original is very plain-speaking.
> Sisson on the other hand has produced a very readable Catullus
> which sounds nothing like Zukofsky's. Which is right?
And then there's the Peter Whigham one in Penguin, which also comes highly
recommended (by Wm.C.Williams no less) for its colloquial everyday speech,
again said to be there in the original (what do plain-speaking and
colloquial everyday mean in this context? perhaps we should start with our
own language...). But none of them, I'd say, are "right", all bring things
which aren't in the original, and leave behind things which are. You have
to choose. Zukofsky's Cat's "convoluted" until you learn to say it, to
mouth the words, at which point a sound emerges which I find thrilling,
rewarding, and with a convincing relationship to the sound a Catullus
might have made (sez who? don't fall into the "authentic music" trap).
Happily, with Catullus one can have all the alternatives: but what about
Dante? Who, having ploughed through one of the numerous scholarly,
dry-as-dust jobs of D is going to pick up another and start all over
again?
Boring translations cost (poetic) lives. Prior to one of my forrays into
Eastern Europe I picked up an anthology of translations to see what the
boys and girls in that part of the world were up to, and was struck by the
sheer tedium, the ordinariness of them all: yet a host insisted, these
were accurate translations, of really important poems which had seen then
through dark times. Only at the end of the trip did I get to HEAR an old
chap putting the (original) words on the air: from that point I was
hooked: the rhythms were strong and densely packed, and the words (which I
couldn't understand) banged off each other in a way which the translations
hadn't even attempted. I'd rather not understand something exciting than
completely understand something banal, and those hack translators have a
lot to answer for, I'd say. We may live in a quantitive "golden age" but
there's a lot of base metal about...
RC
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