“Among the most controversial of Zukofsky’s mature poetic techniques was his method of phonetic translation, in which he sought to bring a foreign text into English first and foremost by reproducing its sound. Zukofsky’s translations—or ‘transliterations’—represent an important innovation in poetics. While every formal decision a poet makes imposes a certain limitation upon the words of the poem, phonetic translation does so to an unprecedented degree: the sound of the foreign text, that is, becomes the more-or-less rigid template over which the poet must plot his language. As in so much of Zukofsky’s work, which constantly deploys the rhetoric of aurality, of music in particular, his method of translation forces meaning—the traditional aim of the translator—into a position of belatedness. If the new text’s ‘meaning’ approximates that of the original, well and good, but more often the sounds of the foreign poem generate new and unsuspected significations in its English translation.”
—Mark Scroggins, “Z-sited Path: Late Zukofsky and His Tradition,” in Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries
