The Translator’s Invisibility

Where the Latin text makes rather general and noncommittal references to Caesar’s sexuality, Graves chooses English words that stigmatize same-sex sexual acts as perverse: a question raised about “pudicitiae eius famam” (“his sexual reputation”) becomes a “specific charge of unnatural practices,” while “contubernium” (“sharing the {34} same tent,” “companionship,” “intimacy”) makes Caesar a “catamite,” a term of abuse in the early modern period for boys who were the sexual objects of men (OED). As an archaism, “catamite” deviates from the modern English lexicon used throughout this and other Penguin Classics, a deviation that is symptomatic of the domesticating process in Graves’s version. His prose is so lucid and supple that such symptoms can well be overlooked, enabling the translation to fix an interpretation while presenting that interpretation as authoritative, issuing from an authorial position that transcends linguistic and cultural differences to address the English-language reader. Graves’s interpretation, however, assimilates an ancient Latin text to contemporary British values. He punctures the myth of Caesar by equating the Roman dictatorship with sexual perversion, and this reflects a postwar homophobia that linked homosexuality with a fear of totalitarian government, communism, and political subversion through espionage. “In the Cold War,” Alan Sinfield notes, “prosecutions for homosexual ‘offences’ rose five times over in the 15 years from 1939,” and “communist homosexual treachery was witchhunted close to the heart of the high-cultural establishment” (Sinfield 1989:66, 299). Graves’s fluently translated Suetonius participated in this domestic situation, not just by stigmatizing Caesar’s sexuality, but by presenting the stigma as a historical fact. In the preface, Graves remarked that Suetonius “seems trustworthy,” but he also suggested inadvertently that this Roman historian shared sexual and political values currently prevailing in Britain: “his only prejudice being in favour of firm mild rule, with a regard for the human decencies” (Graves 1957:7).

Foreignizing translations that are not transparent, that eschew fluency for a more heterogeneous mix of discourses, are equally partial in their interpretation of the foreign text, but they tend to flaunt their partiality instead of concealing it. Whereas Graves’s Suetonius focuses on the signified, creating an illusion of transparency in which linguistic and cultural differences are domesticated, Ezra Pound’s translations often focus on the signifier, creating an opacity that calls attention to itself and distinguishes the translation both from the foreign text and from prevailing values in the target-language culture.

In Pound’s work, foreignization sometimes takes the form of archaism. His version of “The Seafarer” (1912) departs from modern English by adhering closely to the Anglo-Saxon text, imitating its compound words, alliteration, and accentual meter, even resorting to calque renderings that echo Anglo-Saxon phonology: “bitre {35} breostceare” / “bitter breast-cares”; “merewerges” / “mere-weary”; “corna caldast” / “corn of the coldest”; “floodwegas” / “flood-ways”; “hægl scurum fleag” / “hail-scur flew”; “mæw singende fore medodrince” / “the mews’ singing all my mead-drink.” But Pound’s departures from modern English also include archaisms drawn from later periods of English literature.

ne ænig hleomæga
feasceaftig ferð frefran meahte.
Forpon him gelyfeð lyt, se pe ah lifes wyn
gebiden in burgum, bealosipa hwon,
wlonc ond wingal, hu ic werig oft
in brimlade bidan sceolde.

(Krapp and Dobbie 1936:144)

Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he littles believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides ’mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.

(Pound 1954:207)

The word “aye” (“always”) is a Middle English usage that later appeared in Scottish and northern dialects, while “burghers” first emerges in the Elizabethan period (OED). The words “’mid” (for “amid”) and “bide” are poeticisms used by such nineteenth-century writers as Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and Morris. Pound’s lexicon in fact favors archaisms that have become poetical: “brine,” “o’er,” “pinion,” “laud,” “ado.”