Venuti's discursive force-field situates the intuitivism of Holmes’prescription within a theoretical framework based on a historically inscribed opposition between "domesticating" and "foreignizing" translation strategies, the former threatening an "End of History" stasis in translation theory and practice. Thus, Holmes' comfortable heuristics are geopoliticised: “Anglo-American culture [remains] dominated by domesticating theories that recommend fluent translating" (Venuti 1995: 21). To achieve this fluency "translation is required to efface its second order status, with transparent discourse, producing the illusion of authorial presence, whereby the translated text can be taken as an original" (ibid.: 7). The corollary of this process is that the translator is rendered invisible: "The translator's invisibility at once enacts and masks an insidious domestication of foreign texts, rewriting them in the transparent discourse that prevails in English" (ibid.: 16-17).

In confronting the pressures towards fluency and transparency, translation faces hard choices: "the translator…. may submit to or resist dominant values in the target language… Submission assumes an ideology of assimilation at work in the translation process […] Resistance assumes an ideology of autonomy, locating the alien in a cultural other […]" (ibid.: 308).

The choice faced by the translator is between co-option or opposition. The former entails expert use of a "mediating technique" which disappears the translator, through which British and American publishing has successfully produced "cultures in the UK and US that are aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with English language values" (ibid.: 15), and "a cultural narcissism and complacency, an unconcern with the foreign that can only impoverish British and American culture and foster values and

policies grounded in unequality and exploitation" (Venuti 1998: 89).

Opposition - the (ethical) antidote to this unidirectional centre-periphery textual traffic, and its consequential ethnocentric violence - is, for Venuti, embodied in a foreignizing translation [which articulates] the difference of the foreign text… by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. In its efforts to do right abroad, this translation method must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience - choosing to translate a foreign text excluded by literary canons for example, or using a marginal discourse to translate it. (Venuti 1995: 20)

Hence the use of a foreignizing translation idiom in the case of this one poem served two purposes – and perhaps a third, more difficult, "situationist" purpose;

The first purpose was to confront the prevailing “Drab” tone of voice, and "modesty of gesture", which arguably even today sets the tone of modern and recent poetry and, following Holmes as discussed above, that of its translated simulacrum, a discreet kind of "ethnocentric violence" characterizing translated poetry at large, a rhetorical gesture which in neutralising overt violence (see 'liberal' disapprobation of Gangsta rap) sanctions a hegemonic "minus" violence of global reach.

The second purpose was to honour the Dionysian creative mode of the poet's writing, which intensifies following his self-discharge from the disintegrating Imperial Army in April 1917, and his literally peripatetic tracking of the theatres of often unsecured revolution and civil war - Khlebnikov wrote compulsively, a "graphomane" whose lips constantly and soundlessly "uttered" his writing gestures, as if in obedience to Rimbaud's famous slogan, "Le dérèglement de tous les sens" (except, for him, the derailing of an equally compulsive mathematical "sense" of numbers). The parallel with Rimbaud is tempting, but the opposition also is to be noted - Rimbaud's Faustian Ivan (Karamazov) and Khlebnikov's Parsifal-Alyosha are antipodes.

Thus inserting this translation within a large number of translations in a more restrained and normative mode constitutes a "report" on the poet's "dionysian" mode of production, nourished by Futurism's abrasive or clowning outrances, via translation into a "speech mode" (rap poetry) equally dionysian. As a whole the translations intended for the TP anthology naturally gravitated towards a "High" or "Golden", in some cases archaizing mode, a re-enactment of Khlebnikov's peculiar resistance to "Drab" rendering, a separateness from his own mainstream contemporaries captured in a formula coined (and much quoted) by the eminent editor and commentator of his work, Yury Tynianov: "our single epic poet of the century" ("On Khlebnikov", in Khlebnikov 1928-1933, I: 24).