Comments on: Miss her, Catullus?

By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:25:29 +0000

Yes, indeed, Bunting coined the term “Overdrafts.” Richard Price explains it nicely: “By calling these works ‘Overdrafts’ Bunting publicly affirms that he has come to an understanding of indebtedness with the poets who, as it were, underwrite him. On that basis, he can only supply what is provisional—a draft—and must also in some sense obscure, write ‘over,’ the work of his poetic betters. But to take out an overdraft is usually to smoothen cash flow problems: in this case by translating these works, the poet keeps his own poetry moving, in currency, in credit.” (”Basil Bunting and the Problem of Patronage”) Bunting collected them in a section of his work accompanied by the amusing note, “It would be gratuitous to assume that a mistranslation is unintentional.” He did eventualy publish the Peleus and Thetis excerpt, which dates from about 1933. (Bunting experimented with a system of grouping poems under the rubrics Odes, Carmina, Sonatas, and Overdrafts over a long period of time…) Anyway, B.’s version is based on Catullus LXIV, Catullus’s longest poem – itself a kind of dissent from the old epic style which had been worn down by hack writers: the answer was to come up with mini-epics that featured a story inside a story. So you can see the chain is very long!

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:11:20 +0000

Don, isn’t the Bunting you quote (the one where he breaks off in frustrated disgust) one of the “overdrafts” (Bunting’s name for translations) which Bunting decided not to publish in his lifetime? (Do you want to talk about “overdrafts” as a label for translations? I love Bunting’s coinage– and I’m not sure all American readers will get the plain sense of the word.)

By: Alicia (A. E.)

Alicia (A. E.) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:10:28 +0000

Thanks for the comments, folks. I love the Bunting anecdote! Poem 64 ,a little mythological epic about Ariadne “embedded” in an ekphrastic poem framed by the wedding of Pelus and Thetis is the sort of charming and mannered writing that doesn’t electrify as much as elegant but contemporary-feeling metrical lyrics about stolen dinner napkins or buggering or hopeless love with an older married woman. But it also would seem to show that C., who died at around 30 years old, had ambitions to branch out to other genres.
To be honest, I don’t know the Zukofsky Catullus much beyond this one, which I rather like. I did a stint of high school Latin teaching and students certainly got a kick out of it. It was of course a collaboration, with Celia doing the heavy lifting.
I didn’t know the delightful Creeley–or if I had I had forgotten it (thanks for bringing it to my attention!)–and found this great sound file of it over at PennSound:
Stomping with Catullus
It reminds me that verse translation is, among other things, a conversation of poets over the ages–the dead speaking to the yet-to-be-born, the present speaking back cheekily to its ancestors–poets speaking as contemporaries and peers, not as awed and bald scholars wearing the carpet with their shoes.

By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:20:33 +0000

I’m with Steve on Z – although this is heresy in some circles, I always found the Z translation of Catullus to be obtuse and prudish at worst, just an exercise at best.
I love Don’s anecdote about Bunting – one of my favorite poets, and not prudish in the least; so I wonder what he meant by Catullus’s “drivel?”

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 23:40:03 +0000

Scots has been a neat resource for translators, parlty b/c it can include both very modern idioms and very “folk,” unalienated, earthy ones– sort of a middle zone between preindustrial societies’ languages (including sophisticated preindustrial societies, like Catullus’s) and ours.
I didn’t remember Zukofsky’s Catullus as anything like that good, or that consistent. The version you quote gets better as it goes along.
I wonder what you’d think of Creeley’s “Stomping with Catullus,” five increasingly colloquial, increasingly free translations (or “translations”) of Catullus LXX?

By: Jennifer Reeser

Jennifer Reeser — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:54:49 +0000

Total agreement here as far as the trying on of alternate voices through translation, Alicia. Your incisiveness reminded me of a most memorable modern comment (I believe it was Rachel Hadas, though I can’t credit her with its origin) to the effect that of all poetic acts, translation stands as the most selfless. I think the interpretations and applications of that statement are myriad.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:23:40 +0000

Interesting about the Davies – I’m grateful to see it! (There’s a Penguin anthology of English-language versions of Catullus called, “Catullus in English” edited by Julia Haig Gaisser that folks might like to track down – every poem is represented, and it also has poems that wouldn’t have existed without Catullus by the likes even of Dorothy Parker!) Anyway, I wonder what you make of the Northumbrian poet, Basil Bunting, whose work was continually haunted by Catullus. Bunting was a shrewd reader of the classics (and other things), and once remarked, “Whether Catullus is being ornamental or direct, he uses invariably the most straightforward Latin syntax, the language of a man talking.” (Then, too, in his rendition of Peleus and Thetis, Bunting gets through a few dozen lines before cutting the translation short with the text: “–and why Catullus bothered to write pages and pages of this drivel mystifies me”!!