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7. Catachresis and Metaphor: ‘‘Be Bold, Be Bold, Be Not Too Bold’’ in the Latin Rhetorical Tradition and Its Renaissance Adaptors Twice in recent chapters, I have invoked Richard Lanham’s definition of catachresis as a wrenching of metaphor or an extravagant use of it, in any case, as a violent (mis)use of language. Qualifying Lanham’s definition, I have also observed the appreciation of traditional rhetoric for the necessity, and not merely the extravagance, of catachresis in the absence of any other suitable words. Lanham’s definition is a cogent synthesis abstracted from classical and Renaissance sources, and I have annotated it as such, along with reference to Patricia Parker’s provocative analysis of definitions of metaphor and catachresis from classical times to the twentieth century. Here, I would additionally reference a similar, briefer, and more recent discussion of catachresis by Lisa Freinkel in connection with her reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets.1 Both Parker’s and Freinkel’s interpretations bear on issues that have been evident in the present volume from the start. Both identify classical conceptions of catachresis with what Freinkel describes as ‘‘the ultimately catachrestic structure of all metaphor’’ for which Derrida argues in ‘‘White Mythology’’ and thus as ‘‘the lack/rupture at the center of signification itself: the rupture that signals the ‘differance’ within sameness.’’2 Asking what ‘‘is at stake in the distinction between catachresis and metaphor,’’ Parker similarly responds with Derrida’s view that ‘‘catachresis threatens the very distinction between proper and figurative on which the understanding of metaphor as something secondary and deviational—in relation to a ‘proper’ meaning—characteristically relied’’ (‘‘Metaphor,’’ 65). Parker reaches her conclusion, however, only after first employing the responses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rhetoricians to illuminate and interpret earlier ones, whereas Freinkel finds hers full strength in the classical sources and Augustine, which would have been available—indeed, familiar—to Renaissance writers. While my differences from Parker and Freinkel mainly involve details of translation, selection, and emphasis, these do mount up and finally suggest a different understanding of propriety, of metaphor, and necessarily of the latter’s relation to catachresis. They therefore bear on the 129 130 Translating Investments role of cultural history in interpretative readings, whether of classical rhetoricians , the House of Busirane, or Shakespeare’s sonnets. I hardly need observe at this point that translation has inherently not merely an interpretative but also a metaphorical dimension. The translation of classical and Augustinian sources is about as fundamental to the history of metaphor (translatio) and catachresis as it gets, and thus, fundamental to any interpretation of these figures. Often I have found respected Loeb translations of the relevant rhetorical texts of Cicero and Quintilian ‘‘loaded’’ from a historico-cultural point of view informed by late twentieth-century theory , particularly of the post-structural variety.3 This is a point of view with legitimate claims, as evident in my initial chapter, and it is the one adopted by Freinkel and more complexly by Parker. But it is also a point of view to be questioned with respect to its totalizing claims, and it is challenged fundamentally by biases of translation in this instance. Not surprisingly, then, such bias is enmeshed in the very questions of translation and history, sublation and origin, and synchrony and diachrony, with which I began. For example, the Sutton/Rackham translation of Cicero ’s De Oratore renders the phrase describing metaphors quasi alieno in loco collocantur ‘‘placed in a connection not belonging to them’’ and thereby introduces a notion of ownership dubiously expressed in the original, even while dropping the qualifying adverb quasi, ‘‘as if,’’ that indicates figurality or a counter-factual condition. I am not suggesting that the Sutton/Rackham translation of ‘‘alieno loco’’ is inaccurate in terms of bilingual dictionary definitions (which, we do well to remember, are doubly interpretative), because it is certainly not so. I am only saying that it is a misleading definition for present readers and that from a contemporary perspective it is inappropriate to the Ciceronian context.4 In the context of relevant linguistic discussion in De Oratore, alienus carries a stronger notion of being ‘‘strange’’—that is, ‘‘foreign,’’ as in early modern English reference to the merchant stranger or the Protestant stranger who finds religious asylum in England—than it carries a sense of dispossession or invasion.5 In the Ciceronian treatment of metaphor, such strangeness conveys at moments an accompanying positive sense of admiratio or...

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