Hospitality of the Mouth and the Homophonic Kiss: David Melnick’s Men in Aïda

“In kissing do you render or receive?”

— William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 4.5.40 (1602)

In early 1981, poet Robert Duncan, as a “spin off” to his classes at New College of California, began to lead a weekly reading group dedicated to the translation and intoning of the Iliad. This “Homer Group,”—which included David Levi Strauss, Diane Di Prima, and Aaron Shurin among other poets and scholars—”continued for the next six years, finally chanting & translating every word and every line of the Iliad” (Levi Strauss 17). Their chanting sessions, Levi Strauss recalls, would last late into the night, directed and harmonized by Duncan’s own notations for intoning the Greek syllables: “diacritical marks as pitch indicators—gliding up a third on an acute accent, down a third on a grave” (18). It was an overly ambitious undertaking, the type one would expect to fall apart promptly, especially considering that, of the eight original members, almost none had previous experience with Homeric Greek. Nevertheless, this utterly alien and dead tongue would come to occupy an erotic locus, an adhesive center, to which most of them would remain remarkably faithful over the years: “Whatever else was going on in our lives, the reading practice was constant . . . Duncan spoke of our relation as a marriage, that we were married to the poem” (18-19). Amongst this polygamous circle, however, there was one, poet David Melnick, whose intonations of the Iliad became particularly “obsessive [and] perverse” (19), whose translations became more clingy than faithful. In 1983, Melnick—then the author of Eclogs (1972) and PCOET (1975)—would publish the first offspring of this Homeric affair, giving it the name Men in Aïda, Book I.

Released from Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press in a print run of 400 copies, Men in Aïda, Book I opens without a “translator’s preface” or any introductory account of the work’s derivation from Homer.¹ It opens,

Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, emery Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if tea mousse suck, as Aïda, pro, yaps in.
Here on a Tuesday. ‘Hello,’ Rhea to cake Eunice in.
‘Hojo’ noisy tap as hideous debt to lay at a bully.
Ex you, day. Tap wrote a ‘D,’ a stay. Tenor is Sunday.
Atreides stain axe and Ron and ideas ‘ll kill you.

 

(1-7)

And proceeds in kind for over 600 lines. While the poem does not name itself as a homophonic translation of the Iliad, as Charles Bernstein noted, “anything more than the most cursory reading…would move to its relation to Homer” (201). A relation to Homer, or, a relation with Homer; one so intimate, in fact, as to be inscrutable. So intimate that the text dare not speak its name.

For when Melnick aligns his mouth to Homer’s, he “covers a homosexual pandemic riotously lurking in the very sound shape of Homer’s Iliad” (McCaffery and Rasula 246). The opening lines above are nothing other than obsessively close homophones of Homer’s opening to Book I:

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeō Achileos
oulomenen, he muri Achaiois algae etheke
pollas d’ iphthimous psuchas Aidi proiapsen
herō-ōn autous de helōria teuche kunessin
oiōnoisi te pasi Dios d’ eteleieto boule
ex hou de ta prota diastetev erisante
Atreides te anax andrōv kai dios Achilleus.

(1-7)²

Melnick’s “translation” holds erect the auditory axis of Homer’s speech, not merely letting the sound lead—as is said of Zukofsky’s homophonic Catullus (Bernstein 10)—but dictate. And in this unlimited susceptibility to the dictates of a foreign tongue, Melnick allows for the creation of meaning to become an incidental effect of the duty to wrap his mouth around the received phonemes.

The dictation of Greek sound into the English mouth produces a translation seemingly irreconcilable not only to Homer’s meaning, but even to its own narrative progress and, at times, its own status as “English.” Characters appear in one line never to be heard from again —”Newton neon met” (48); syntactical relations are frequently inscrutable—”Hose foe ye pro yea breeze say dozen neck cake houris” (336); when sentences are grammatically complete in themselves, they typically fail to integrate—”Ten might do, son. Whee, yes Achaians!” (392). There are, however, points at which diction appears more than random. When, at line 6, we encounter, “Tap wrote a ‘D,’ a stay. Tenor is Sunday,” we could string together that someone, possibly named “Tap,” is writing musical notations. Other lines, when read aloud, seem to hover just outside of sense; they sound as though they do mean something in English, but we need a few words defined for us. Compare, for example, Melnick’s “O garb a silly coal o’ they is / Noose on a nast” (9) to Lewis Carroll’s lines from “Jabberwocky”: “All mimsy were the borogoves / And the mome raths outgrabe” (21-22). Despite their being unintelligible, the words sound as though they are communicating to us in English and belong to the English speaking mouth. However, as we will see, once Melnick lets the Greek in, once the gates are opened to the English mouth, the foreign tongue thereby receives a complete permission to contaminate and disrupt, from within, the proper conventions of its host.

In order to accommodate the phonic range of Homer’s speech into the constrictions of English, Melnick appeals to a multitude of Englishes at once, often collapsing a “discursive heterogeneity” (Venuti 200) into the space of a single line: “Pied dapple lentoid doe cat, the old year rain neck atom bane. / Heck, say yes, say stay, sonny. You’d mate on pay rib bean moan” (447-448). At once reciting and listening to Homer, Men in Aïda reveals, as Venuti says of the Zukofskys’ Catullus, “a dazzling range of Englishes, dialects and discourses that issued from the foreign roots of English . . . and from different moments in the history of English-language culture” (216-217). Moreover, the homophonic mouth must be prepared to make room for historically estranged bedfellows. The Germanic Thor confronts the biblical Isaac. Popeye and Pope trade bawdy barbs. The epic warriors of Homer interact with “Rae,” “Ken,” or “Danny.”

How exactly does Homer’s arete schism become homoeroticism? Well, by letting the sound dictate an inversion of our hierarchy of attention within the speech of the Iliad. That is, pithy phonemes in the Greek suddenly transfigure into guiding motifs of homoeroticism in the English: men (a Greek particle, loosely meaning “well” or “so”) becomes “men”; kai (a coordinating conjunction) becomes “guy” or “gay”; toi (the plural definite article) becomes “toy.” It can happen, though, that the translation looks both ways. The suffix marker of the passive voice thai, for example, results in frequent instances of the word “thigh”—”make his thigh” (8), “Dick his thigh” (19) , “deck his thigh” (20)—which could allude to acts of paraphilia as well as the Greek god Dionysus, born out of the thigh of Zeus.

Of course, Melnick’s Men in Aïda is not the first attempt at so-called homophonic translation. Aping the sounds of Latin into English, it is said, was a long beloved pastime for English schoolboys (Raffel 440). However, the foundational work in the twentieth century for the movement of homophones from the field of frivolous play to scholarly translation came with Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s translation of the complete canon of Catullus, published in a bilingual edition in 1969. Any discussion of the homophonic-as-translation must acknowledge this innovative and controversial work. Within their brief prefatory statement to Catullus, the Zukofskys explain their translation as an attempt to follow along with the phonetic patterns of Catullus’s original speech while at the same time keeping pace with his meaning (Prepositions 225). The line that the Zukofskys straddle, between sound and sense, results in a noticeably affected but nonetheless intelligible English rendition. Take, for example, the lines from Catullus’s song 8:

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod vides perisse perditum ducas

which in a semantically faithful translation reads: “Poor Catullus, you must stop being silly, and count as lost what you see is lost” (Wiseman 142). The Zukofskys, in contrast, begin by carrying the Miser into a rough homophone of “Miss her,” which likewise retains the original’s connotations of love lost. The following desinas undergoes a greater phonetic stretch in the admonition “don’t be so . . .,” with ineptire providing the close cognate “inept”—just as perisse easily transfers to “perish” rather than “lost.” However, the Zukofskys also let through the literal semantic of quod vides as “what you see,” even though its phonetic resemblance is minimal, for the sake of maintaining the poem’s general expression. Adhering strictly to neither sound nor meaning, the Zukofskys’ “translation moves in and out of the Latin, now essaying a strong word, now falling back into more literal transfers to contain the revisionary energies within the general semantic frame of the Latin” (Hooley 116). Though the translation met with harsh criticism from most reviewers on grounds of infidelity (see Raffell), the Zukofskys were, unlike Melnick, at least under the influence of the semantics and syntax of the words he “breathed with,” having been provided by Celia with a complete parsing. Whereas the Zukofskys’ translation thus mediates between sound and sense, “mov[ing] in and out of Latin,” Melnick forces sense into sound so that any reference becomes accidental to the continuum of phonics. Although Melnick can indeed read Greek, his translation depends on no more knowledge than could be gleaned in an hour-long course on pronunciation. Yet, precisely because Melnick carries the practice of homophonic translation to the outermost of reference, further consideration should be brought to his reproduction.

What happens, then, when we try to speak of Men in Aïda as a translation of Homer’s Iliad? English translations of the Greek epic are, to be sure, as different from one another as they are similar. But what can we say when we place, for instance, Pope’s translation of Chryses’ opening speech to the Greeks,

Ye kings and warriors! may your vows be crown’d,
And Troy’s proud walls lie level with the ground.
May Jove restore you when your toils are o’er
Safe to the pleasures of your native shore.

(23-26)

next to Fitzgerald’s rendering of the same,

O captains
Meneláos and Agamémnon, and you other
Akhaians under arms!
The gods who hold Olympos, may they grant you
plunder of Priam’s town and a fair wind home…

(20-24)

and add to the conversation Melnick’s

A tray id I take. I alloy a uke, nay me days Achaians.
Human men theoi doyen Olympia dome attic on teas.
Ech! Pursey Priam’s pollen, eh? You’d eke a Dick his thigh.
Pay Dad, am I loose! At a pill. Lent Ada a pen to deck his thigh…

(16-19)

Do we have anywhere to go? Can we even build a vocabulary to speak about what Melnick does? Really, what’s the matter with Men in Aïda?

It is in the context of Men in Aïda, I argue, that we can pointedly engage the question Derrida follows in his essay “Des Tours de Babel”: “does not the ground of translation finally recede as soon as the restitution of meaning . . . ceases to provide the measure?” (177). This question of Derrida’s itself translates the one posed by Benjamin in his 1921 essay “The Task of the Translator,” which (translated by Harry Zohn) reads: “[I]s not the ground cut from under [translation] if the reproduction of the sense ceases to be decisive?” (260; emphasis added). Primarily because both Derrida and Benjamin engage heterolinguistic translation apart from semantic reproduction and towards an ethics of contact, I have found these two essays fruitful for the building of a vocabulary not only for the homophonic translation, but also for the furtive erotics of translation to which Melnick’s homophones bear witness.

Whereas Benjamin confronts the problem of linguistic incommensurability as a vestige of an initial unicity, the oneness of a “pure language,” Derrida proceeds from the myth of the tower of Babel—what he calls the translation of the origin of translation—to argue for the necessary impossibility of translation. This impossibility lies not merely in deriving a “‘true’ translation, a transparent and adequate interexpression” (“Des Tours” 166), but is located by Derrida in translation itself as a form inherent with “incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating…” (165). The “event” of linguistic division—the always already occurring fall of Babel and the curse of confusion—”at the same time imposes and forbids translation” (170). This duality of post-Babelian language—wherein translation proceeds from its impossibility—provides the condition under which we can “make sense” of Men in Aïda as a translation and justify any claim that it is a translation.

Fallen is the genealogy-without-genesis of this situation, in which the translator finds himself confronted with the intractably foreign text, which at once casts both the source and the target language as incomplete and untotalizing. At the junction of translation, the two languages stand exposed, face to face, as though realizing their nakedness by their difference. But this exposure of incompletion in the foreign text at the same time makes a demand, imposing itself not simply as the foreign, but the to-be-translated. That is, the translator receives a foreign text as a call into debt: “The translator is indebted, he appears to himself as translator in a situation of debt; and his task is to render, to render that which must have been given” (“Des Tours” 176). The source text dispatches the duty out of a need for a complement, since “at the origin it was not there without fault, full, complete, total and identical to itself. From the origin of the original-to-be translated, there is exile and fall” (188). This responsibility enjoined by the exposure to foreign language has further critical resonances with Žižek’s account of the formation of an ethical human subject:

My very status as a subject depends on . . . the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds it: what makes an individual human and thus something for which we are responsible . . . is his/her very finitude and vulnerability.

(138)

Not only is the experience of alterity a given for the subject, this alterity further exposes the fault, leaves open the wound, which calls, reciprocally, the subject into responsibility. Likewise for Derrida, the translator, in being exposed to the “finitude and vulnerability” of a foreign language—and in turn that of his own language—is called into translation: not to reproduce what he sees, but, as I will show is the case for Melnick, to complement the incompletion of a foreign text’s “bodily-desiring substance.”

Robert Duncan, perhaps locating the source of Melnick’s translation in this “exile and fall,” made the following suggestions for lines 14 and 21 on a manuscript of Men in Aïda sent to him by the translator (handwritten notes in brackets):

Stem Attic on anchors, in neck cable. Oh Apollo on us. [apple onus?]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[apple owner]
As oh men idiots who unneck a bowl on Apollo on her

Translation responds, out of its fallenness, to the wound of the foreign text, to the call issued forth from the gape of its incompletion. The gape which demands translation, being that point most resistant to translation, will become for the target language the very object of its desire. This building desire will draw the translation into a relationship of nearness to the original, which Benjamin and Derrida are correct to distinguish from similarity to the original. Derrida writes that the translation offers a “post-maturation” of the original through which it may “live more and better” (“Des Tours” 179). That is, in order for the translator to respond to the non-totalization of the original—which, at least in the case of the Iliad, is a “dead” language—he must “ensure its growth” by means of difference: “[A] translation weds the original when the two ajointed fragments, which are as different as possible, complete each other to form a greater language” (qtd. and trans. in Bannet 585).³ Thus to extend from the source also necessitates an adherence to the source in the formation of a jointing point. For, in its very finitude, its need to be translated, the original cannot claim an originary authority to be adhered to, but can only call out of its need to be adhered against.

Just as in Plato’s dialogue on ero¯s, The Symposium, Aristophanes conceives of human beings “cut in two, each half [longing] for the other,” so too I believe we should posit b etween the translating and the to-be-translated something of an urge or desire made available by fragmentation. If there is, as Derrida claims, a demand made to the translator, I must think that it is the ineluctable character of a desire. Aristophanes says of his early humans, who were pre-reproductive but post-erotic: “out of their desire to grow together, they would throw their arms around each other when they met and become entwined” (191b, 30).⁴ And here Aristophanes, like Derrida and Benjamin, conceives of growth not as reproductive energy, but adhesive. It ushers forth, that is, from a deep entwining, which implies contact as well as reception. The to-be-translated and the translating texts receive the gift of this receptivity specifically from fragmentation, so that the translator sees the to-be-translated as that which is “longing for the other.” In her indispensable essay on the Babelian translation theories of Derrida and Benjamin, Eva Bannet writes,

Translation is . . . the mark of an “essential incompletion” (230). But its failure is also its success, for it is the incompletion of languages and texts which allows them to add-join themselves each to each, like fragments of some larger vessel. And it is the infinite task of translation which promotes what Benjamin calls “the reconciliation of tongues” by turning each toward an other, by making each language and text call to and for an other, and by directing us from each to others and to something Infinitely Other of which each is merely a fragment.

(587)

The two tongues turn together to remedy an internal incompletion, their personal restlessness. Once reproduction is taken off the table, what is left but to touch, and by touching, grow together? That transparent translation cannot occur, that Homer cannot say what he means in English, allows for Melnick to enter himself as translator and co-creator. The impossibility of total translation lets there be two—Melnick and Homer—who, as fragments, must turn, “each toward [the] other,” in an act of affection.

I want to keep with this idea of affection (namely of the “bodily-desiring substance”) between Men in Aïda and The Iliad and look back to Benjamin when he writes, “Just as the tangent touches the circle only in a fleeting manner and at a single point … so the translation touches the original in a fleeting manner and only at an infinitely small point of meaning” (qtd. in “Des Tours” 189). Derrida accompanies Benjamin’s language of the “fleeting” touch an d extends it into a “caress,” as in, “[The translation] does not render the meaning of the original except at that point of contact or caress” (emphasis added; 190). In the case of Melnick, the physicality of the caress appears much more than metaphorical. And, where could we say this contact occurs but at the mouth? How could we at all explain the production of Men in Aïda if not by the translator’s desire to move his mouth with the author’s (and right on his mouth)? For this reason, I choose rather the term “kiss” to describe Melnick’s translational procedure (“Kiss ’em, men, no ape is sin” [30413]), which carries the connotations of “caress”—as contact between the outermost edges-but also adds an intentionality to this encounter. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes of the “community” formed between two mouths: “[The speaking mouth] is— perhaps, though taken at its limit, as with the kiss—the beating of a singular site against other singular sites” (31). The directed “beating” of the kissing mouth further insists upon hospitality to the foreign mouth: moving with it, not just duplicating, but complementing and completing its articulations. Keeping in mind also the proposed desire of translation, the synchronization of this kiss is at once a union of two mouths as well as a manifestation of the internal erōs of division.

More than any caress, the kiss, as British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips claims, marks precisely that point of “[t]he individual’s first and forever-recurring loss . . . of the fantasy of self-sufficiency, of being everything to oneself” (99). For, unlike caressing, kissing is the erotic encounter we can never have with ourselves (Phillips 99). Our “craving for other mouths” accordingly proceeds from the initial incompletion of an autoerotic totality, out of which the mouth seeks its corresponding loss in foreign bodies: “The child may stroke or suck himself, or kiss other people and things, but he will not kiss himself. Eventually, Freud writes in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he will kiss other people on the mouth because he is unable to kiss himself there” (Phillips 94). Kissing perforce requires another mouth, not only as an object of one’s affection, but as an agent as well. As Phillips argues, kissing “blurs the distinction between giving and taking” insofar as it is an “image of reciprocity, not of domination” in which “the difference between the sexes can supposedly be attenuated” (96). In the kiss, the difference between the original and translation recedes behind their mutual limit points, which is precisely where, as we shall see, incomplete mouths move in unison. In the hospitality of the homophonic kiss, one mouth clings to another in a fearful symmetry, mutually gaping, receptive and penetrating.

It could be argued though that Melnick becomes more of a “mouthpiece” for Homer than a mouth-kisser. That is, Melnick, by speaking Homer in English, allows himself to become an intermediary, whose relationship is one of automatist possession. Ron Silliman’s description of Melnick’s performance of Men in Aïda certainly might suggest such a relationship:

David Melnick . . . gives a reading of this text that literally stuns its audience, for underneath its ribald surface he has managed to capture a remarkable presentation of the actual music of the original. You can close your eyes & almost hear it in either language.

Is this a witness to the miraculous? Wouldn’t we be right to find a parallel to this account in the apostolic multilingualism of the Pentecost?

When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language . . . “Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?” . . . Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

(Acts: 6-12 NIV)

The “stunning” assiduity with which Melnick conforms to the word of Homer could lead us to declare just as Socrates does to the rhapsode Ion, “You are no artist, but speak fully and beautifully out of Homer by being held under divine inspiration.”5 The tendency of Melnick’s tangential line away from creativity and towards automatism seems, no doubt, a noteworthy aspect of his translational practice. However, rather than transparently doubling languages, Men in Aïda locates itself in that juncture between languages, speaking neither just as it attempts to speak both. For one could just as easily say that Men in Aïda gives us neither an English nor a Greek. Its place is the limit, the outermost of two semantic ranges, where signification must break off in order to be doubled. Indeed, Melnick meets, not communicates, Homer. This meeting of the outermost edges of two tongues is what Nancy above calls the “limit” of the speaking mouth, namely, the kiss.

The question remains where does this kiss occur, this limit point of the speaking mouth, and can we call it the “infinitely small of meaning”? I want to consider for this purpose just one line, which contains a decisive point of the translator’s visibility. Melnick translates line 78 of The Iliad (Book 1) as “Egg are oh yummy. Andrews call o’ semen hose Meg a pant on,” which in the Greek reads:

E gar oiomai andra cholosemen hos mega panton

I would argue that, with even closer adherence to the Greek phonics, this line could also be rendered as

Egg are oy! oh my! And rock, ah! Lo, see men hoes mega-pant own.

The disparity between Melnick’s translation and my own should be sufficient enough to show that his task was significantly more than automatic. Yet, what is most striking in Melnick’s line is his disfigurement of the Greek andra (man) into Andrews. Silliman has said that Melnick made a point to include the names of personal friends and lovers in Men in Aïda, and we can see in this case that the phonics of the Greek are stretched to atypical distortion specifically for the inclusion of the proper name. In a letter sent to Robert Duncan in 1983, Melnick points out one line of translation he made specifically in tribute to his friend, saying in a parenthetical note, “(I did put you in Book II, though—'”His better none,” my Muse sigh’ at ‘espete nun moi, Mousai,’ II, 484, remembering your ‘adoption’ of that passage.)” It would appear, then, that we can be justified in reading the inclusion of the proper name, such as Andrew, as a tribute, an act of attention toward an individual.

I propose that this deviation, the cleft of transference from andra to Andrews, provides an entry point into understanding Men in Aïda as a translation. That is, if we can locate the “infinitely small of meaning” at which Melnick kisses Homer, we must do so at the place of the proper name. Looking back to the poem’s opening line (“Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles!”), we can readily identify the proper name Achilles as the only point of contact that Melnick’s translation shares with every semantic translation of Homer into English, the only point of contact, moreover, that directs us back to Homer at all. It will, of course, sound as a paradox to identify the proper name with an “infinite small of meaning” precisely because the proper name is understood to be that without a communal, and thus translatable, meaning. Thus, Αχιληοσ will be to us Achilles, not because we understand this to be its meaning, but because we do not know anything else to call. To translate Achilles’ name by something we know would be to call another name entirely, and thus not to be saying Achilles at all. After all, getting one’s name right is to say it right. To translate andra as Andrew, then, is to empty out the conceptual reference in deference to the orgasmic calling out of Andrew, “Andrews call o’ semen,” and then further to name the vocation of man (andra) in Andrew, the object of the translator’s affection.

It seems clear that the caress between Men in Aïda and The Iliad must occur at the outermost perimeters of the translation and the to-be-translated. Yet, because we have designated this contact not just a caress, but specifically a kiss, we must also find here a supple and susceptible aperture, like the mouth. And, it is the condition unique to the proper name that it should both belong and not belong to language. Its place is uneasy, on the outmost and innermost edge of the foreign and domestic, sense and babble.6 It has no place in dictionaries, but yet “it remains caught in [the same] system of phonic differences or social classifications” that gives rise to dictionaries (Of Grammatology 89). Roman Jakobson “singles out proper names” as being exemplary of the heightened instability that occurs when the linguistic code (langue) references itself (Verbal Art 196): “In the code of English, ‘Jerry’ means a person named Jerry. The circularity is obvious: the name means anyone to whom this name is assigned” (Selected Writings II 131). In order to define the proper name, we must include the signifier itself, as that to which the name points; thus it is not so much that the proper name is an instance in which the sound, as the signifying material, prevails over meaning, but that the meaning leads us circularly back to that very signifying material. This in turn demands that when the translator comes across a proper name, he must use the very phonetic sign of the name in order to translate it. Take, for an interesting example, one of the most frequent proper names to come up in Melnick’s translation: Guy (e.g., “Ballet and a puree, neck you on Guy on totem, may I?”[52]). What had begun, in English, as an instance of the code-on-code, the proper name of Guy, gradually inflated to mean any man whosoever. Indeed, the code was pulled off the code, Guy was pulled off of Guy (occurring, the OED tells us, in nineteenth-century America), and became re-circulated within the functions of reference as the depersonalized guy. Melnick, in almost all cases choosing the self-adhesive Guy over the referential guy, re-focused the signifier upon the signifier as a particular object of his affection. Likewise, just as in turning guy into Guy, he signals that he is talking about a singular object (some guy named Guy), so to, in translating the Iliad by its very signifying material, he indicates a single and attractive performance of the mouth.

The proper names most readily identifiable as the site of translation would be those of the author and translator, Homer and David Melnick. The contract and the contact would take place between these two names:

[The contract] surpasses a priori the bearers of the name, if by that is understood the mortal bodies which disappear behind the sur-vival of the name. Now, a proper noun does and does not belong, we said, to the language, not even, let us make it precise now, to the corpus of the text to-be-translated, of the to-be-translated.

The debt does not involve living subjects but names at the edge of language or, more rigorously, the trait which contracts the relation of the aforementioned living subject to his name, insofar as the latter keeps to the edge of the language. And this trait would be that of the to-be-translated, from one language to the other, from this edge to the other of the proper name.

(“Des Tours” 185)

Derrida’s “translation” of translation as the movement between opposing edges of the proper name is also, because the proper name locates itself at “the edge of the language,” the slightest possible movement “from one language into the other.” The debt of translation is fulfilled, as it were, by this traverse from the foreign to the domestic by way of the proper name. Yet, we must acknowledge that much more is at stake in Men in Aïda than a movement across these “traits” of the subjects (author and translator), even granting that these living subjects have “disappeared behind the sur-vival of the name.” That is, the proper names in this translation may not be, or be most importantly, the subjects of Homer and David Melnick. In this case, it would also be misleading to say with Derrida that the proper noun does not belong to the corpus of the text to-be-translated. It is misleading precisely because, for Men in Aïda, the text to-be-translated is treated entirely as its own proper name.

To make this point—that the proper name is the text of The Iliad itself—I will return to the cover of Men in Aïda, which, as was noted above, does not announce itself as a translation of Homer. But in Melnick’s refusal of the proper name Homer he does not attempt to obscure its derivation, letting his work stand on its own. For, while Men in Aïda is not signed by Homer, it is signed by the Greek text itself. Below his own name, Melnick instead chose to place the first line of The Iliad, “Μηνιν αειδε, θεα, Πηληιαδεω Αχιληος” (see Fig. 1).

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Cover of Men in Aïda. Used by permission.

 

The line stands untranslated, “shining like the medallion of a proper name” (“Des Tours” 177). The translation, then, bears the signature of the to-be-translated speech of Homer, thereby alerting us to the position of the proper name, which is also the position of the kiss. By signing his translation with Homer’s untranslated speech, rather than his untranslated name, Melnick emphasizes the mediation of his kiss. It re-states the sentiment of that singer of the Song of Songs who says to his love not simply, “Let me kiss him,” but rather, “Let him kiss me with the kissing of his mouth.” That is, the kiss will not occur directly from the mouth, but by that which the mouth performs. In our case, the performance of the mouth, the kissing of the mouth of this particular kiss, is the speaking of a proper name.

Inviting not just the kiss of Homer, but the kiss of the kissing of his mouth, Melnick fixes the proper name of The Iliad to its “unique occurrence of a performative force” (“Des Tours” 177). And in what we might call oral fixation of Men in Aïda, we find no caution before the purity of the original, no hesitancy about violating the source, nor of letting the source violate the target language. If anything, Melnick’s is a work of contamination, wherein vulnerability precedes fidelity. David Levi Strauss recalls the susceptibility of the homophonic mouth that Melnick spread amongst his fellow chanters in the Homer Group sessions:

. . . there were times when Melnick’s polymorphous perverse monosyllabic homophonics infected our reading—when we ‘heard things’ in the Greek and the contagion took over, until we were all screaming on the carpet: “Oy, cod! Day, he am a known hoopoe. Dare you hermit a neon!”

(19; emphasis added)

In order for the Greek to find its place in English, the homophonic mouth accepts the “infection” of its own tongue. Violation is a concern proper only to the task of restitution. In contrast, for a true hospitality of the mouth, Melnick must open up—be supple and susceptible to the foreign “contagion.” And who opens up for the foreigner without first being supplied a name? Thus, Derrida is right to assert that any susceptible hospitality to the foreigner must begin precisely upon the proper name: “this foreigner, then, is someone with whom, to receive him, you begin by asking his name . . . This is someone to whom you put a question and address a demand, the first demand, the minimal demand being: ‘What is your name?'” (Of Hospitality 27). The host (Melnick) must first receive the proper name, and that name must strike him at once as properly untranslatable in order that he open up to receive it, allowing the rights of the foreigner within the hospis of his mouth. In Melnick’s hospitality of the mouth, the responsibility of translation commences at the reception of the proper name. This proper name is given over to the domestic mouth, which will accept the name just as it violates the name by the mispronunciation of its repetition (Αχιληοσ is received as Achilles). Indeed, two foreign mouths can continue to hold true to each other only by speaking proper names, which are their mutual valences: what they allow to belong to the other as proper to his language and malleable to his tongue.

If we ask, further, what of Melnick’s translation causes us to regard it, along with Levi Strauss, as a form of perversion, can we not easily answer that it arrests its development at the level of kissing? Rather than passing through the kiss as an intermediary foreplay to an inevitable reproductive climax, Melnick arrives at the mouth as an erotic aim in itself. Freud, under his discussion of “Fixations of Preliminary Sexual Aims,” notably observed that all kissing risked perversion in the individual’s “tendency to linger over the preparatory activities and to turn them into new sexual aims that can take the place of the normal one” (22). These preparatory-turned substitutive aims, Phillips writes, will arise “independent of the desire for nourishment or reproduction,” subsisting merely on the pleasure of erotic contact (97). For Melnick, the oral “caress” of the kiss is locked in as a perpetually unconsummated encounter that defers (to the point of becoming substitute for) the reproduction of the foreign text. And by substituting a perpetually preparatory touching for the “release of sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct” (Freud 15), Melnick perverts what has become the normative expectation that foreign texts have of their translators. Indeed this perversion is exactly the risk the homophonic translator must take: that he may invest too much in his kisses, that he may kiss for too long. But Melnick, we can begin to trust, will not pull away, stubbornly preferring the perversion to the hasty consummation (and release) of the translational encounter. And when lips are locked, the translation will not come up for air, for as soon as the kiss is broken the translator admits that he has had enough of the tongue, that he has “traversed” his oral attachment and now moves “rapidly on the path towards final sexual fulfillment” (Freud 16). We should not be surprised, then, when those who welcome in the homophone to their mouths, such as those members of Melnick’s “Homer Group,” inevitably revert to the infantile: rolling around on the carpet and screaming.

To take stock, then, it is my claim that (1) Melnick and Homer kiss with the kiss of their mouths; (2) that this kiss occurs at the proper name, Benjamin’s “tangent point” where the original and translation fuse; (3) that the proper name is both a point of susceptibility and a point of untranslatability; (4) that, as a point of fusion, the proper name defines the trajectory of the translation. That is, this point of fusion defines the trajectory of Melnick’s translation insofar as it, perversely, refuses to leave the kiss of the proper name.

The proper name marks the point at which—in (Jakobson’s) code-on-code action—the foreign and domestic mouths meet, and, by refusing to break from Homer’s mouth, Melnick also refuses to let go of the name. His obsessive attachment to the mouth thus proliferates in gratuitous, untranslatable proper names:

“Name heir, Tess. Mend, aim my hoopoes, Kay. Oh Guy caught a noose on. Yep, oh ape, a pay you toy. A pee day, oh sop. Pray you, aid Deo. Oh son, ago met a Paw sin at the moat, at eight. Theo same me.”

Ten day Meg gawk this as prose ape pain. Nay filly, Gary Thaddeus.

(514-517)

In the reciprocity of the homophonic kiss, both mouths are pushed to the limit of communication just as they are pushed to the limit of translatability in the proper name. Melnick’s over-naming of Homer’s speech reconfigures translation as a vocative calling out, directed toward that most resistant point of untranslatability, the point at which the translator’s only recourse is to open his mouth and learn to match its shape. Learning to match the foreign mouth undoubtedly demands at times new and uncomfortable movements, contortions, and extensions of the tongue, but, as Phillips writes, “[kissing] is part of the ongoing project of working out what mouths are for” (96). It is not surprising that such an activity is accompanied out of Melnick’s mouth by a rhythm of exclamatory interjections—what we now no longer call “ejaculations”: “Ack!”; “Ick!”; “Whee!”; “Eek”; “Ow”; “Eh”; “Ay!”; “Heigh!”; “Ho!” and so forth. These exclamatory interjections, literally the “thrown in” pieces of non-grammatical speech, are the uncontrolled, irresistible outbursts of verbal expression, “those which,” according to British philologist John Earle, “owe least to conventionality . . . and [are] most dependent upon oral modulation” (197-198). Thus they seemingly rupture forth at every possible moment in Men in Aïda, bearing witness to a speech not only “affected by the foreign tongue” (qtd. in Benjamin 262), but overwhelmed by its desire for the foreign tongue. Unmistakably, the most frequent interjection of Melnick’s translation is the utterly erotic and evocative O/Oh, which so permeates and punctuates the text that it imbues the entire translation with the charge of an exclamation:

Leto’s and Zeus’ son. O gar a silly coal’ they is.

(9)

“Ooh ma’ Gar! Apollo on a deep hill, oh no Tess Sue, Calchas”

(86)

Oh your final men ate owned alone. Newt is a rat, oh.

(198)

Oh Ron oh then Pro dame make a tess a Luke call on us, Hera.

(208)

O come at his Theban, here reign Paul in yet you knows.

(366)

The structure of the “oh…oh…oh” within which Melnick calls out the proper name, builds an erotic momentum toward consummation (climax) that is nonetheless regressive in its infantile orality. For, as Earle also observed, the interjection O/Oh “is well known as one of the earliest articulations of infants, to express surprise and delight” (191). Yet, insofar as the delight of the O and Oh emerges in accompaniment to the proper name (“Oh Ron oh”), it forces the translation into the direct address of the vocative. When, at line 74, Melnick’s translation reads “O Achilles, kill, lay, I Amy, Dee feel lame. ‘Myth,’ he says…,” the opening “O Achilles,” quite directly translates the Greek O Achileu, in which the Greek omega is the interjection of direct address. Likewise, when Melnick renders line 149 as “Oh my, an Ide day, yea! Nippy aim in a curdly oaf, Ron,” he directly translates the Greek exclamatory interjection O moi into “Oh my.” In these instances, as in instances of proper names, it is conventional for the translator of Greek to mimic the interjection in sound, with the understanding that he has come upon a moment “when the suddenness and vehemence of some affectation or passion” has reduced speech to what Earle calls “the mere germ of verbal activity.” Yet, when the translator opens his mouth to being entirely infected with this intruding germ—that is, in the instance of the un-breaking kiss—he will not reach the end of this interjection. The vehemence of the affectation from the foreign tongue will suddenly cause him to render the original as a singular interjection by which he calls out the proper name of Homer’s oral performance as “Oh Ron oh” or in a more ejaculatory sense “Andrews call o’ semen.”

If we return then to the guiding question of what Melnick translates of Homer, or, more importantly, what Melnick translates of translation, we see that we have come to an understanding of translation as a calling out to the original, a call that welcomes in the foreign tongue not merely, as Benjamin would have it, as an agent to “expand and deepen his language” (262), but to contaminate and pervert it as well. By refusing to move on from the “tangent point” at which the original and translation fuse, Melnick seizes upon the proper name as the resistant point of translation which demands he take it into his mouth. The radical reconfiguration Melnick makes of translation, from a reproduction to oral adhesion, reveals the furtive erotics that grounds the translational extension of one tongue to another. Just as Freud concludes that “even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions'” (15), so too, I suggest, the perverse speech of Men in Aïda, shows to us, in a heightened development, those erotic “constituents which are rarely absent from” the pleasures of “healthy” translation (Freud 26), at least as these translations appear in their infant stages (26). Melnick, we could say in a more practical manner, did not depart from the process that he and his fellow members of the “Homer Group” went through in their attempts to derive a translation of the Iliad; he merely stunted this process in its “preparatory activities,” protracting the time in which he and they, and we readers, may be attentive to the foreign tongue pressing against our own.