The more we move ahead, the more we're stuck in rewind

[sovay]

I dreamed of Catullus' brother. Catullus 101 was the last thing I looked at before bed, although I have less and less faith that I will ever be able to render it into English that doesn't feel false or erasing; mostly I got the murky, amnesiac kind of nightmares where waking only leaves you feeling worse for having had them in your head, but all through them a dark young man in modern clothes—or stage-modern, like contemporary Shakespeare; Jarman's Marlowe—kept recurring, so that at first I identified him with Dante's Vergil before realizing he was another kind of literary shade. He never spoke; he hung around the edges of things, as if he were shy of being noticed, as if he were the one grieving. There were cold forests and institutional brick buildings and I wish I had tried to touch him, to see if he were a ghost in the classical fashion. He might have been my age. Catullus is supposed to have died when he was thirty, but it's not like we have proof either way. Jerome was wrong about his death-date. No one recorded his brother's. The dream didn't tell me his name.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What is it about the poem that makes it hard to render into English without the translation being erasing? (I find this concept scary and compelling: a translation that erases the original somehow. Obscuring or misrepresenting is bad enough, but erasing...)

It must have been Catullus or his brother. Must have been.

[sovay]

What is it about the poem that makes it hard to render into English without the translation being erasing?

I don't want my voice to replace the poet's. Some of what Catullus writes for his dead brother is universal to the experience of grieving, or at least not uncommon: the anger, the desolation, the futility of addressing oneself to the dead who cannot answer back; and how we speak to them anyway, as we go through the rituals of mourning because they provide consolation or because they are the responsibilities of tradition or simply because what else is there to be done? But it is also his grief, not mine, and his words are exactly what they need to be. I can't supplant them with English. I can only try not to get in their way; and so far I don't feel I'm succeeding.

It must have been Catullus or his brother. Must have been.

I have never dreamed of Catullus. I have something I want to write him in Latin, but I haven't got it worked out yet.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What you say about the uniqueness of each person's grief, and not wanting to get in the way of it, makes me feel both the terrible responsibility and difficulty of translation and also the--okay, I know, it's an old theme, but there's a reason why we come back to it--loneliness of the human condition.

Sometimes all we can do is walk beside someone, even when walking beside them is such an insufficient act.

I suppose a good translation will do that.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Sometimes all we can do is walk beside someone...

Yes.

Not a translation but a parallel? Another line, in harmony? A shadow?

Nine