The Translator’s Invisibility

[It] conveys the peculiarities of Suetonius’s methods and character better than any other translation. Why, then, have I been asked to “edit” it? Because Robert Graves (who explicitly refrained from catering for students) did not aim at producing a precise translation—introducing, as he himself points out, sentences of explanation, omitting passages which do not seem to help the sense, and “turning sentences, and sometimes even groups of sentences, inside-out.” […] What I have tried to do, therefore, is to make such adjustments as will bring his version inside the range of what is now generally regarded by readers of the Penguin Classics as a “translation”—without, I hope, detracting from his excellent and inimitable manner.

(Grant 1980:8–9)

In the twenty-two years separating Graves’s initial version from the revised edition, the canons of accuracy underwent a change, requiring a translation to be both fluent and exact, to make for “vivid and compulsive reading” (ibid.:8), but also to follow the foreign text more closely. The passages quoted earlier from the life of Caesar were evidently judged accurate in 1979, since Grant made only one revision: {38} “catamite” was replaced by “bedfellow” (ibid.:32). This change brings the English closer to the Latin (“contubernium”), but it also improves the fluency of Graves’s prose by replacing an archaism with a more familiar contemporary usage. The revision is obviously too small to minimize the homophobia in the passages.

Pound’s version of “The Seafarer” also cannot be simply questioned as too free because it is informed by the scholarly reception of the Anglo-Saxon text. As Bassnett has suggested, his omission of the Christian references, including the homiletic epilogue (ll. 103–124), is not so much a deviation from the text preserved in the Exeter Book, as an emendation that responds to a key question in historical scholarship: “Should the poem be perceived as having a Christian message as an integral feature, or are the Christian elements additions that sit uneasily over the pagan foundations?” (Bassnett 1980:96). In English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, for example, Stopford Brooke asserted that “it is true, the Seafarer ends with a Christian tag, but the quality of its verse, which is merely homiletic, has made capable persons give it up as a part of the original poem” (Brooke 1898:153). Pound’s translation can be considered accurate according to early twentieth-century academic standards, a translation that is simultaneously a plausible edition of the Anglo-Saxon text. His departures from the Exeter Book assumed a cultural situation in which Anglo-Saxon was still very much studied by readers, who could therefore be expected to appreciate the work of historical reconstruction implicit in his version of the poem.