Economies of Scale by Ann Keniston

Author:Ann Keniston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031393419
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Considered in terms of its length and compression, this translation seems to offer an efficient and synecdochic rendition of Catullus’ original, an epitaph rather than an elegy. But while Carson reconnects the poem’s separated words into singularity, the final translation is radically fragmented, as is especially evident in sentences that don’t syntactically cohere. In the phrase “what a distant mood of parents / handed down as the sad gift for burials— / accept!,” for example, it is unclear what exactly is being handed down (it seems to be the mood, which here functions as a kind of gift), who is doing the handing down (is it the parents?), and who is being exhorted to “accept!” the gift (or perhaps the mood). A more standard translation resolves all these questions: “But now accept these gifts dripping with fraternal tears, / handed down by the ancient custom of our forefathers” (Green). By mimicking the syntax of the original Latin, which defers verbs to the end of phrases or sentences (Derbyshire), Carson keeps reminding readers that the poem is a translation. Parenthetical interjections absent in the original expose her hesitation. In these ways, Carson enacts the contradictory impulses evident in all translation, which seeks to be faithful both to the original language and to the one into which the text is translated. But Carson’s word-by-word translations also convey the temporal process of translation by impelling the reader to witness translation’s seemingly wasted labor, which more conventional translations conceal. In this way, Carson indirectly evokes a temporal confusion associated with the financialization of debt, especially a mode of “speculative time” that makes “pasts, presents, and futures … open to constant revision” (Adkins 81) while it prioritizes “the nonchronological and indeterminate” (82).

The poem’s incoherence also echoes its thematics of theft and attempted repayment. Carson’s assertion “Fortune tore you from me, you / oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,” for example, combines repetition (of “you,” “me,” and “wrongly”), an interjection (“oh”), a verb (“tore”), and proto-economic language (“poor”) to demonstrate not only the speaker’s distress but her sense of injustice. Carson also highlights the imbalance of the poem’s central transaction, in which the speaker is impelled to “give you the last gift owed to death.” That money isn’t owed but rather a “gift” intensifies the asymmetry involved in giving “you” what is in fact “owed to death,” an act that apparently indirectly repays an earlier “[wrong]” inflicted by a personified “Fortune,” which may or may not be synonymous with death.

Carson also imposes another redundancy on the original poem. While most translations clarify that the gift offered early in the poem is the same as the one or ones referred to later, Carson distinguishes an early wish to “give you the last gift owed to death” from an apparently separate offering of a “sad gift,” this one both “handed down” and intended “for burials.”18 The first (but “last”) gift thus seems to unreceived or unreceivable, impelling the speaker to proffer a different, seemingly more modest

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