Reading and Performing Louis Zukofsky's 1967 Translation of Plautus' Rudens (workshop)

Plautus’ Rudens was an especially apt choice for Louis Zukofsky’s eccentric manner of translation (Zukofsky 1967), as its fascinating mixture of comedy and melodrama, its lively stage action, its metrical/musical variety, and its exuberant sound play combine to make it unique in the Plautine corpus. After a brief introduction to the play, this paper describes how these features work together in the passage chosen for performance at this workshop: lines 615-705.

In 1967 Louis Zukofsky made a poetic rendering of Plautus’ Rudens, which he incorporated into his a long poem “A” as the twenty-first of its twenty-four sections. This paper offers an introduction to “A”-21 aimed at classicists. Zukofsky’s “transliteration” (his term) of Plautus’ comedy is less well known than the complete Catullus he made in collaboration with Celia Zukofsky. It is also less easy to describe and evaluate, both as a poem and in relation to what, on the ordinary translation model, would be called its source text.