Abstract
ABSTRACT“Better mendacities,” thundered Ezra Pound, “than the classics in paraphrase!” Taken as a translator’s credo, this quotation ranks risky, even spurious invention above servile, plodding efforts at approximation. This striking opposition of possibilities is not always tangible, especially when it comes to the more inventive acts of poetic translation that followed Pound’s own. Perhaps the two most controversial such translations of the twentieth century, Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus (1969) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin (1964), represent different extremes of the pursuit of the “literal,” but can one be called a “mendacity” and the other a “paraphrase” (and if so, which is which)? This essay compares both the poetics and the receptions of these two translations in order to explore the stakes of the pursuit of the “literal.”
Published Version
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