The Translator’s Invisibility

Symptomatic reading can thus be useful in demystifying the illusion of transparency in a contemporary English-language translation. In some translations, the discontinuities are readily apparent, unintentionally disturbing the fluency of the language, revealing the inscription of the domestic culture; other translations bear prefaces that announce the translator’s strategy and alert the reader to the presence of noticeable stylistic peculiarities. A case in point is Robert Graves’s version of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars. Graves’s preface offered a frank account of his domesticating translation method:

For English readers Suetonius’s sentences, and sometimes even groups of sentences, must often be turned inside-out. Wherever his references are incomprehensible to anyone not closely familiar with the Roman scene, I have also brought up into the text a few words of explanation that would normally have appeared in a footnote. Dates have been everywhere changed from the pagan to the Christian era; modern names of cities used whenever they are more familiar to the common reader than the classical ones; and sums in sesterces reduced to gold pieces, at 100 to a gold piece (of twenty denarii), which resembled a British sovereign.

(Graves 1957:8)

Graves’s vigorous revision of the foreign text aims to assimilate the source-language culture (Imperial Rome) to that of the target language (the United Kingdom in 1957). The work of assimilation depends not only on his extensive knowledge of Suetonius and Roman culture during the Empire (e.g. the monetary system), but also on his knowledge of contemporary British culture as manifested by English syntactical forms and what he takes to be the function of his {30} translation. His “version,” he wrote in the preface, was not intended to serve as a “school crib,” but to be readable: “a literal rendering would be almost unreadable” (ibid.:8) because it would adhere too closely to the Latin text, even to the Latin word order.

Graves sought to make his translation extremely fluent, and it is important to note that this was both a deliberate choice and culturally specific, determined by contemporary English-language values and not by any means absolute or originating with Graves in a fundamental way. On the contrary, the entire process of producing the translation, beginning with the very choice of the text and including both Graves’s textual moves and the decision to publish the translation in paperback, was conditioned by factors like the decline in the study of classical languages among educated readers, the absence of another translation on the market, and the remarkable popularity of the novels that Graves himself created from Roman historians like Suetonius—I, Claudius and Claudius the God, both continuously in print since 1934. Graves’s version of The Twelve Caesars appeared as one of the “Penguin Classics,” a mass-market imprint designed for both students and general readers.

As J.M. Cohen has observed, the translations in Penguin Classics were pioneering in their use of transparent discourse, “plain prose uniformity,” largely in response to cultural and social conditions:

The translator […] aims to make everything plain, though without the use of footnotes since the conditions of reading have radically changed and the young person of today is generally reading in far less comfortable surroundings than his father or grandfather. He has therefore to carry forward on an irresistible stream of narrative. Little can be demanded of him except his attention. Knowledge, standards of comparison, Classical background: all must be supplied by the translator in his choice of words or in the briefest of introductions.

(Cohen 1962:33)