Drastic literalism: The translation extremes of Nabokov and Zukofsky
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Better mendacities,” thundered Ezra Pound, “than the classics in paraphrase!” Taken as a translator’s credo, this quotation ranks risky, even spurious invention above servile, plodding efforts at approximation. This striking opposition of possibilities is not always tangible, especially when it comes to the more inventive acts of poetic translation that followed Pound’s own. Perhaps the two most controversial such translations of the twentieth century, Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus (1969) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin (1964), represent different extremes of the pursuit of the “literal,” but can one be called a “mendacity” and the other a “paraphrase” (and if so, which is which)? This essay compares both the poetics and the receptions of these two translations in order to explore the stakes of the pursuit of the “literal.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it