The Translator’s Invisibility

Graves’s version of Suetonius reflects the cultural marginality of classical scholarship in the post-World War II period and the growth of a mass market for paperback literature, including the bestselling historical novels by which he made a living for many years. His translation was so effective in responding to this situation that it too became a bestseller, reprinted five times within a decade of publication. As Graves indicated in an essay on “Moral Principles in {31} Translation,” the “ordinary” reader of a classical text (Diodorus is his example) “wants mere factual information, laid out in good order for his hasty eye to catch” (Graves 1965:51). Although Apuleius “wrote a very ornate North African Latin,” Graves translated it “for the general public in the plainest possible prose.” Making the foreign text “plain” means that Graves’s translation method is radically domesticating: it requires not merely the insertion of explanatory phrases, but the inscription of the foreign text with values that are anachronistic and ethnocentric. In the preface to his Suetonius, Graves made clear that he deliberately modernized and Anglicized the Latin. At one point, he considered adding an introductory essay that would signal the cultural and historical difference of the text by describing key political conflicts in late Republican Rome. But he finally omitted it: “most readers,” he felt, “will perhaps prefer to plunge straight into the story and pick up the threads as they go along” (Graves 1957:8), allowing his fluent prose to turn transparent and so conceal the domesticating work of the translation.

This work can be glimpsed in discontinuities between Graves’s translation discourse and Suetonius’s particular method of historical and biographical narrative. Graves’s reading of Suetonius, as sketched in his preface, largely agreed with the contemporary academic reception of the Latin text. As the classicist Michael Grant has pointed out, Suetonius

gathers together, and lavishly inserts, information both for and against [the rulers of Rome], usually without adding any personal judgment in one direction or the other, and above all without introducing the moralizations which had so frequently characterized Greek and Roman biography and history alike. Occasionally conflicting statements are weighed. In general, however, the presentation is drily indiscriminate. […] the author’s own opinions are rarely permitted to intrude, and indeed he himself, in collecting all this weird, fascinating material, appears to make little effort to reach a decision about the personalities he is describing, or to build up their characteristics into a coherent account. Perhaps, he may feel, that is how people are: they possess discordant elements which do not add up to a harmonious unity.

(Grant 1980:8)

{32} Grant’s account suggests that the Latin text does not offer a coherent position of subjectivity for the reader to occupy: we are unable to identify with either the author (“the author’s own opinions are rarely permitted to intrude”) or the characters (“the personalities” are not given “a coherent account”). As a result, Suetonius’s narrative may seem to possess a “relatively high degree of objectivity,” but it also contains passages that provoke considerable doubt, especially since “his curiously disjointed and staccato diction can lead to obscurity” (ibid.:7–8). Graves’s fluent translation smooths out these features of the Latin text, insuring intelligibility, constructing a more coherent position from which the Caesars can be judged, and making any judgment seem true, right, obvious.

Consider this passage from the life of Julius Caesar: