Poem 16 illustrates the difficulty of ‘‘cultural translation’’; no less vexing for the translator are poems in which the point of the piece rides mainly (if not entirely) on its sounds and word-play. Among these, the most intractable is poem 84. Skinner remarks that ‘‘if there is one piece in the collection that displays the wit and technical brilliance... essential to the neoteric epigram, ...itis certainly poem 84, the splendid lampoon - justly famous even in antiquity - on Arrius’ mistreatment of the aspirate’’ (2003: 104). Splendid though this poem is in Latin, however, the modern reader confronting it in translation is almost inevitably left with the feeling that something must have been funny about this poem, but that whatever it was eludes us.
Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda uellet dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias, et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum, cum quantum poterat dixerat hinsidias. credo, sic mater, sic liber auunculus eius, sic maternus auus dixerat atque auia. hoc misso in Syriam requierant omnibus aures: audibant eadem haec leniter et leuiter, nec sibi postilla metuebant talia uerba, cum subito affertur nuntius horribilis, lonios fluctus, postquam illus Arrius isset, iam non lonios esse sed Hionios.
The problems this presents to the translator are formidable indeed. The most obvious question is what precisely is the point: why are Arrius’ misaspirations funny, or at least worth satirizing? Kelley’s absolutely literal prose translation (1891: 91-2) demonstrates that the answer is not transparently obvious from the poem’s content:
Whenever Arrius had occasion to say the word commodious he would say chommodious, and hinsidious when he meant insidious, and he hoped that he had spoken marvellously well when he had aspirated hinsidious as much as he could. I believe his mother, his uncle Liber, and his maternal grandfather and grandmother spoke thus. When he was sent into
Syria, our ears all had a respite, for they heard the same words pronounced smoothly and lightly. Thenceforth they had no dread of them, when suddenly the horrible news arrives, that the Ionian waves, after Arrius had gone thither, were no longer Ionian but Hionian.
This translation is lexically precise and a complete failure at conveying the slightest hint of the original poem’s sal and lepor; in particular, it gives no indication of the word-play that forms the poem’s punch-line. The last four words are almost certainly a bilingual pun, where the Latin Hionios represents the Greek chioneous, ‘‘snowy.’’ As Quinn says, Arrius’ aspirates have ‘‘inflicted a chill upon the Ionian’’ (Quinn 1973a: 421; cf. E. Harrison 1915: 198, Green 2005: 261).
I have argued elsewhere that this poem’s point lies in the actual sounds that Catullus uses to create the poem; the placement not only of the aspirates but also of the sibilants mimics the mistakes of Arrius’ over-breathy pronunciation (Vandiver 1990). In short, the interplay of sound and sense is not an ornament to this poem, but is the poem. In translation, when these elements are lost, the poem falls very flat. If sounds are what matter in this poem, then might this be the place where the Zukofsky version comes into its own? To my mind, the answer must be no. The Zukofsky does achieve some remarkable parallel sounds spelled as English words; for instance, the end of line 11, postquam illuc Arrius isset, is rendered as ‘‘post qualm ill look Arrius’ is it?’’ (1969: n. p.). Apart from omitting the elision of postquam and illuc (which would be pronounced, more or less, postquilluc), the correspondence of sound is striking; but the sense of the translation does not resemble, let alone reproduce, the sense of the original. This is sound devoid of any coherent sense, sound overprivileged to the exclusion of meaning. This fails in the opposite direction from Kelley’s literal prose paraphrase, but is no less a failure.
Most translators are interested in conveying the poem’s meaning, however; and the fact that this poem deals with the aspirate presents translators, particularly British translators, with a great temptation. Do we not have a ready-made strategy for translation, a perfect fit, if we simply turn Arrius into a Cockney, whom we can easily call ’Arry? The 1876 version by Hummel and Brodribb demonstrates how this particular act of cultural translation could work:
Whenever ’Arry tried to sound An H, his care was unavailing;
He always spoke of ’orse and ’ound,
And all his kinsfolk had that failing.
Peace to our ears. He went from home;
But tidings came that grieved us bitterly -
That ’Arry, while he stayed at Rome,
Enjoyed his ’oliday in Hitaly.
(Hummel and Brodribb 1876: 15)
This is an example of ‘‘domesticating’’ translation with a vengeance. Not a clue remains to tell us that this was ever a Latin poem; not a trace of strangeness, of cultural ‘‘otherness,’’ is left behind. This version also highlights the conceptual pitfalls involved in translating the Roman social system into the nineteenth-century British one. The picture of‘‘’Arry’’ as a parvenu trying to pass himself off as upper-class, discussing hunting (‘‘’orse and ’ound’’) and taking a holiday in Italy, is at least a partial cultural fit for the picture of Arrius as a provincial trying to sound urbane. But the fit is only partial, and perhaps deceptive. Probably Catullus is indeed satirizing a social upstart, the bombastic orator Q. Arrius, who Cicero tells us rose well beyond the level of his abilities ( Brut. 242-3; for a discussion of the identification, see Skinner 2003: 105-7). More generally, Catullus may be mocking any speaker who tries to sound sophisticated and fails miserably. But the situation is far from simple, especially when we remember that Catullus himself was a provincial. The lens of the British class system is not, perhaps, the most helpful one through which to view this poem. However, the temptation to Anglicize not just the language of poem 84 but its entire social situation is a powerful and long-lasting one. For Raphael and McLeish, for instance, Arrius becomes ‘‘Alf’’ instead of ’Arry (1979: 105). Their version too, like Hummel and Brodribb’s, makes assumptions of class in such phrases as ‘‘That’s our Alf’’; not only the nickname but the use of ‘‘our’’ almost as an honorific before a family member’s name are class-linked.
A middle ground between painful literacy and over-domestication would seem desirable, and in fact many modern translators have attempted such a version. Most modern translators let the subject’s name remain ‘‘Arrius,’’ not ’Arry or Alf (e. g., Whigham 1966; Sesar 1974; Goold 1983; Martin 1990; Lee 1990; Mulroy 2002; Green 2005).17 However, almost all these translators avoid the problem of an aspirated consonant (which is meaningless to most English speakers) and choose a word beginning with a vowel to translate commoda; so, Arrius says such things as ‘‘hadvantages’’ (Goold 1983: 201), ‘‘hemoluments’’ (Lee 1990: 131) or, in Martin’s version, threatens his listeners with ‘‘hawful hinsidious hach-shuns’’ (1989: 121); Green stays closer to the Latin sounds by rendering chommoda as ‘‘chommodore.’’ In almost all modern versions, the Ionian Sea of the last line still becomes Hionian - and fails to be funny. Sesar sends Arrius to Asia rather than the Ionian Sea, and translates Hionios as ‘‘Hasiatic’’ (1974: n. p.). However, this shift does not significantly improve the humor of the English version, and so the overall problem still remains, in Sesar as in other modern translators - why is the poem funny?
World History
