On Brandon Brown, “Sparrow,” from The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum;
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum;
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.
 

Revive my lovebird. I’ve got an aim to muss. Sure, the rumors will sound severe, but right now sock it to me with your duende. We’ll fiercely cum a million times. Then we’ll…Catullus asserts that he and the lovebird will kiss many thousands of times and then he shall conturbabimus them. Conturbabimus literally means something like “to throw into a mob.” Some scholars interpret this as referring to an image in which Catullus counts his kisses on an abacus, which can then be violently thrown into disarray. I suggest that conturbabimus is a metaphor for confounding the coinage. The economic standard in disarray, the society “loses count.”

 
Brandon Brown’s translation of Catullus 5—possibly the most famous and most translated lyric of the Catullus corpus—recalls Yves Bonnefoy’s (translated) bon mot declaring translation a matter of declaration: “You can translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of another” (186). Bonnefoy was thinking of Wladimir Weidlé’s joke that Baudelaire’s “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville…” is a translation of Pushkin (186). The connection between Brown’s text and its inciting site involves much more than Weidlé’s near whimsical (if intuitively insightful) positing of a similarity of tone or approach, its hint at unconscious influence. Yet to call “Revive my lovebird” a translation is clearly a provocation.
 
It would be easier to call Brown’s work an “adaptation.” Currently, this term is most often applied to derivative works that change the medium and/or genre of the original and thus occasion more or less significant changes to that work.¹ Such transformations are at times produced out of reflections on different modes of fidelity or infidelity and the politics of their (im)possibility—for instance, Mieke Bal’s new films, which attempt in their formal features to approximate the accented translation of displaced speakers talking in an unfamiliar hegemonic language.² “Adaptation” becomes “appropriation” in works that critique originals they confiscate and dramatically chop, distend, and otherwise re-imagine for political purposes, often to countermand the silencing or other oppression of the subaltern in the original work (such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or J.M. Coetzee’s Foe).³ When used to label intra-generic, intra-linguistic translations that edit or add to originals or that do not exchange languages at the level of lexia, however, “adaptation” can function as a pejorative term, as it does in Atoine Berman’s discussion of “the system of textual deformation that operates in every translation” (286). While no process of translation can be entirely free of unconscious linguistic resistances that lead translators to domesticate the foreign, as Berman suggests, some translations—particularly those he calls “adaptations”—lack concern for neutralizing foreign-ness: “the play of deforming forces is freely exercised,” he writes, in “ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free rewriting)” (286).
 
Brown comments that conturbabimus signifies “throwing into a mob”; as bookkeeping jargon, the word conjures an image of deranging the counters of an abacus when a calculation is being made.⁴ As he goes on to say, “I suggest that conturbabimus is a metaphor for confounding the coinage. The economic standard in disarray, the society ‘loses count.'” Brown’s discursive detour into commentary after a spate of largely homophonic translation (translation that, relying on sound, substitutes homophones in the translating language–more on this below) points not only to the latent allegory related to the poem’s content and form embedded in Catullus’s suggestive word but to its allegorization of Brown’s activity as translator. Along with other trivia the poet famously inflates, kissing is a hot topic in Catullus’s corpus, one he takes up in regard to both a male and a female partner and that does not sit easily with constructions of masculinity in late Republican Rome. Indeed, kissing—unlike the oral, anal, and vaginal sex Catullus elsewhere graphically and copiously figures as the prerogative of the aggressive male—at least potentially involves a mutual exchange. Ironically, then, kissing is itself an equivalence that upsets the normative rates of Roman gender exchange, just as an infinity of such kisses becomes the sublime other of number altogether, destroying accountability. This infinity of kisses is echoed formally in Catullus’s lyric, whose repetitive language becomes so intensively formalized and formulaic that its density approaches formlessness. So over-inscribed, libidinality is pathless, infinite—reading may wander at will and no matter wind up mid-kiss.
 
The general economy Catullus doubly inscribes is further enacted by Brown’s translation, with its similar disruption of translation’s economic standard of equivalency (translation as the reproduction of meaning as truth). If Brown’s redoubtable homophonic translation on the one hand challenges the separability of materiality and meaning, on the other, in prioritizing materiality, it emphasizes an excess irreducible to meaning as the communication of lexical values. In keeping with this general economy of the signifier, Brown’s aside on Catullus’s trope as corroding calculable restraints on kisses also alludes to his translation as the vehicle of a supplement, not an equivalent: if, as Lawrence Venuti so persuasively theorizes, a translation, with its connotative network, conveys a domesticating remainder, a translation can also attempt to turn this loss of the foreign against the target language by somehow making that remainder a vehicle of foreignness.⁵ Such attempts can never be standardized, just as their successful results emphasize the qualitative differential that mandates equivalence in the first place.
 
As Walter Benjamin and other theorists of translation have passionately argued, a translation should register the shock of the foreign in the translating language; just as importantly, a translation must work to analogize, in its own linguistic environs and with its own linguistic resources, the derangements the foreign text introduces within its “proper” linguistic economy, its otherness in its own context.⁶ In its attraction and attention not just to the otherness of the corpus of Catullus, but also to what might be called its peculiarities (its exquisite perversities), and in the multitude of strategies it uses to convey that foreignness and differential specificity—that is, because and not despite its divagations—Brown’s text emerges as a translation par excellence. Brown’s translations of Catullus powerfully throw down a response to the challenge posed by Charles Bernstein “[to take] translation as its own medium … what is the translation doing that can’t be done in any other medium?” (65).
 
Brown’s translation of Catullus follows upon non-standard renderings by two heroic poets of the North American avant-garde, Louis Zukofsky and Bernadette Mayer, both major influences on Brown’s poetics tout court.
 
Zukofsky spent almost ten years (1958-1966) on his quite famous and infamous translation of the complete corpus. The work was a collaboration with his wife Celia, who provided Zukofsky with a pony, or rough literal translation, of Catullus’s Latin lines, along with metrical notes.⁷ Zukofsky in turn produced versions of the lyrics that, beyond very strongly privileging sound and rhythm, attempted the seemingly impossible: he created verses using English homophones for Latin phonemes while concomitantly honoring or, rather, often sharply interpreting, the Latin’s meaning. Zukofsky’s “breathing with” Catullus, as David Wray has argued, presents a radical undoing of sound-sense dualism, a way of enacting “a materialist view of language that refuses to attribute to speech any level of meaning transcendently separate from its availability to the senses” (“‘cool rare air'” 82). If Zukofsky’s “ars amatoria was also an ars poetica,” Wray suggests, both implied “an epistemology at once sensuous and intellective, according to which caring implies loving entails knowing effects keeping of a kind that by definition eternizes the thing kept” (79). Zukofsky’s translation, which also relies on graphic equivalences, preservation of Latin syntax, and tricky experimentation with quantitative verse in English, thus affirms “a drive toward the condition of totality instantiated by … a human language” (75).⁸
 
Editor (with Vito Acconci) of the journal 0-9 (1972-4) and (with Lewis Warsh) of United Artists Press, and director of the Poetry Project in New York in the 1980s, Bernadette Mayer has been profoundly influenced in her poetry and in her diaristic, epistolary, essay, and inter-genre (in short, exceedingly polymorphous) writing by her study of Greek and Latin literature, which began in Catholic school and continued, as a mode of collaboration, camaraderie, and inspiration, throughout her life. Mayer’s Eruditio ex Memoria (1977), based on class notes from her educational history, is in a way an intellectual autobiography, yet it is also an erudite interrogation, deconstruction, and satire of erudition (see Gordon). The book examines the historical and other connections among languages (including mathematical language) in the abstract while it traverses privileged verbal objects in many languages, framing them both as media for constructing and conveying information, knowledge, tradition, authority, and value, and as materials essentially ruining any straightforward metaphysics, seeing as the thinkers run together hardly agree on the boundaries between the concrete and the ideal, the practical and the philosophical, triviality and profundity, etc. At one point in her translation, Mayer breaks into notes that translate Catullus 5 itself:
 

“Vivamus mea Lesbia…!” Sound: look for elisions, running feet, connotative words (conturbabimus, dormienda) predominance of a’s, m’s. “Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus…” balanced ideas in a balanced construction, placing of words first for emphasis (Omnes, Soles Nobis, Nox), structural shifts in tone., Imagery: “Lesbia” – “senum”; brevis lux et perpetua nox mille…centum, tantum. The mysteriousness of others, “rumores… invicere,” “senum severiorum,” “nequis malus,” the evil-eyed world, the cruel and severe old world, Catullus and Lesbia, “my beautiful love,” “gratum est” and “tua opera” (by your doing)…
 

(Eruditio)

Mayer has not translated Catullus as a corpus; her translations and imitations of individual lyrics are mainly concentrated in The Formal Field of Kissing (1990). The slim volume takes its title from a phrase in her version of Catullus 48, another statement of the poet’s insatiable appetite for kisses unaccountable: “I’d kiss your eyes three hundred thousand times/If you would let me, Juventius/ …even if the formal field of kissing/ Had more kisses than there’s corn in August’s fields/I still wouldn’t have had enough of you” (3). If the rendering is a faithful, more standard translation,⁹ many of Mayer’s Catullus poems are condensations of originals or imitations, as with “Hendecasyllables on Catullus #33”:

You have the balls to say you will be with me
but you hardly ever are, then you say you’re scared
of your parents’ opinion, they pay your rent
I wouldn’t mind that if they didn’t think I
was a whore ridden with Aids disease & worse things
but I am I and my little dog knows me
in the most astonishingly bourgeois way
I even pay my self-employment tax now
and put leftovers into expensive tinfoil
to be used in imaginable tomorrows
therefore I protest my bad reputation
but I do wander all night in my vision.

(27)

As do his urban sensibility and penchant for dropping personal details that signify both socially and more sentimentally, Catullus’s vulgar and sublime eroticism permeates Mayer’s oeuvre, while she also appropriates his images and tropes, his lyric immediacy and address, his play with register and technique, as in “Sonnet”: “My hand’s your hand within this rhyme/ You look at me this is all fucked up time/ I’m just a sparrow done up to be/ An Amazon or something and he? or thee?” (Sonnets 37); and in “Sonnet”: “So long honey, don’t ever come around again, I’m sick of you/ & of your friends, you take up all my time & I don’t write/ Poems cause I spend all my time wanting to fuck you” (Sonnets 64).

 
Known for their economy, intricacy, and elegance, if also for their irresistible naughtiness, Catullus’s poems were celebrated in the culture in which he wrote them, late Republican Rome (first century BCE). His extant corpus comprises 116 poems, split into 3 sections: the first 60 are known as the polymetrics (there are actually 57 of them, as 18-20 are considered spurious); the next 8 are longer poems, 7 hymns and an epyllion (mini-epic); and the last 48 are epigrams (including the famous “Odi et amo”).
 
This selection from Brown’s translation is taken from the polymetrics, which may have circulated in Catullus’s time under the moniker “Sparrow,” as “passer” is the first word of the first poem after the dedicatory lyric. Catullus’s two poems on Lesbia’s pet bird are among his best known, and Brown, with this reception history in mind, dilates his translation through the metonym of the “sparrow.” In fact, he extravagantly undoes Catullus’s triangulation in these particular poems of his relation to Lesbia through the bird by collapsing Lesbia herself into the “lovebird,” a move that amplifies the already spectacularized raging ambivalence of Catullus’s cathexis to the treacherous love object who spurned him (consider, for instance, that the bird dies, occasioning a mock elegy).
 
Split into 60 prose poems that do not literally correspond to the “Sparrow” section’s 60 lyrics, but rather obsess around their anima and ethos, Brown’s translations fantasticate largely by means of Catullus’s central concerns: masculinity, affect, performance, text as corpus and corpus as text, and literary and social form. The “original” Catullus 16 threatens, with a sound face- and ass-fucking, a couple of frenemies who accuse the poet of spoiling his masculinity through his erotic poetry, which stages a seemingly effete conturbation of his desire. The poem is commonly taken to state Catullus’s sense of the separation between performative literary persona and authentic actual person.¹⁰ Yet given the radically status-oriented character of culture in Rome at this time, its will to make signify every matter and manner, reflexive performativity is rather a total social fact that Catullus’s poems in general comment on and participate in with an especial bravura that Brown draws out, particularly in relation to masculinity.
 
As Elizabeth Young’s extraordinary recent revisioning of Catullan poetics elucidates, an important element of the ongoing drama of Catullan machismo is Catullus’s own acts of translation, as Brown’s meta-translative posturing, among other strategies, makes manifest (The Mediated Muse). Bringing the geo-political shifts, social dynamics, and material culture of the Catullan moment to bear on his lyrics, Young persuasively demonstrates that the poems self-consciously style themselves as contact zones, sites where the work of acculturating the foreign fetishes flooding the capital was done. Re-coding the foreign to give it recognizable cultural capital required laundering foreign-ness as an imaginary, valorized “Greek-ness,” in that the cultural patrimony of the Greeks was highly prized by the Romans and was utterly foundational to elite Latin culture, especially since Greece had come under Roman control. Catullus’s poems are not only filled with such Hellenized objects, as Young argues, but style themselves literally and seductively as Greek trinkets or “trifles”: they use Greek meters and literary forms, quote Greek texts, make elaborate use of Grecisms, and perform the passionate affects of Greek lyricism. Though a sense of mastery and propriety over the Grecian was de rigueur for elite Roman men, this intimacy with Hellenic aesthetics could also be seen as an embodiment of Greek effeminacy. As a social climber from an elite provincial family and literary avant-gardiste—thus an expert in the manipulation of codes and the ultimate purveyor of urbanitas—Catullus was able nonetheless to bend this exotic aesthetic towards the consolidation of a new form of Roman masculinity that he and his poems approximated.
 
Such forging of lyric manhood through translation-cum-code-switching-and-laundering is in part translated by Brown through virtuosic play with many speech genres and registers, particularly his incorporation of the rhetoric and prosody of hip-hop (for instance, the traces of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” as Brown mouths, “We want pre-up”): this is not only an appropriate choice in light of Catullus’s taste for invective and verbal virtuosity, but also because it is the contemporary American-imperial performative masculinity most prone to borrowing in the service of consolidating gender capital. And just as we find the obtruding character of the translator himself absorbed into the poetic persona he translates, Brown both reflexively performs Catullan gender performativity and refuses to disavow it disaffectedly. Despite the heavy irony gathering around the ever-more ostentatious and imaginative misogyny he weaves by supplementing the text of Catullan affect, the translator’s own corpus as text, text as corpus remains self-implicated in the errancies of radical ambivalence.
 
Though I know he would object, that seems yet another version of Brown’s translational fidelity.