Zukofsky, Louis 1904–

American poet, critic, and novelist. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)

All literatures have a Zukofsky—a Lu Chi, a Lichtenberg, a Bashô, a Mallarmé. He is the patient craftsman who applies discipline to what everyone else has done in a hurry. He works with the diamond-cutter's precision, placing technical demands upon the act of composition so incredibly difficult that one wonders how he has written anything at all.

Imagine, for example, the great speech of God in The Book of Job when He speaks from the whirlwind translated so that the Hebrew vowels and consonants remain pretty much where they are in the original, and the rhythms are kept so closely that the English when read aloud sounds like the Hebrew. This Zukofsky does in his long poem "A." Now imagine the same process applied to the poems of Catullus, all 116 of them. This Zukofsky has also done. Reading them aloud, one's tongue...

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