Louis Zukofksy, a native speak­er of Yid­dish who wrote exclu­sive­ly in Eng­lish, uses the prac­tice of trans­la­tion as the cen­ter­piece of his poet­ics. As a mod­ernist who worked close­ly with Ezra Pound, Zukof­sky relies heav­i­ly on quo­ta­tion and pas­tiche, as did his men­tor. How­ev­er, instead of ref­er­enc­ing the clas­sics of West­ern lit­er­a­ture, Zukof­sky draws on Yid­dish, and specif­i­cal­ly on trans­la­tions into Yid­dish, to express his vision of a mod­ern poet­ics. Zukof­sky uses Yid­dish trans­la­tion — his own, and that of well-known Yid­dish writ­ers — to incor­po­rate new voic­es and sounds into Amer­i­can mod­ernist poetry. 

The most strik­ing exam­ple of this tech­nique can be found in Zukofsky’s incor­po­ra­tion of pas­sages from the Yid­dish poet Yehoash in his own poems. At times Zukof­sky will trans­late Yehoash’s orig­i­nal works, but he also trans­lates Yehoash’s poems that were them­selves trans­la­tions. Zukof­sky fore­grounds trans­la­tions from Yehoash which are heav­i­ly marked as com­ing from diverse lan­guages, includ­ing Ara­bic and Japan­ese. In this way, Zukof­sky sug­gests that the tra­di­tion that he val­ues is a poet­ic one, that puts aes­thet­ic con­cerns over cul­tur­al ones, and hints to the curi­ous read­er who search­es for the source of his quo­ta­tion that the ori­gins of poet­ic cre­ation are more com­plex than they may real­ize at first. This is a new lev­el of what Lawrence Venu­ti has called ​“for­eigniza­tion.” The text high­lights its for­eign­ness to the read­er, but the for­eign­ness that the read­er may first assume is a false one. This tech­nique desta­bi­lizes read­ers’ assump­tions, both about their own lan­guages and about the process of trans­la­tion. Yid­dish is a sub­merged struc­ture for Zukofsky’s poet­ry, invis­i­ble to all but a read­er con­ver­sant in both Yid­dish and Eng­lish poetry.