The Translator’s Invisibility

In Dryden’s wake, from Alexander Pope’s multi-volume Homer (1715–1726) to Alexander Tytler’s systematic Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), domestication dominated the theory and practice of English-language translation in every genre, prose as well as poetry. It was allied to different social tendencies and made to support varying cultural and political functions. Pope’s Homer continued the refinement of a transparent poetic discourse in the heroic couplet, still a literary elitism among the hegemonic classes, dependent less on court patronage than on publishers with subscription lists that were {66} now increasingly bourgeois as well as aristocratic. It became fashionable to subscribe to Pope’s translation: over 40 percent of the names on the lists for his Iliad were titled, and the MPs included both Tories and Whigs.[9] Fluent translating remained affiliated with the British cultural elite, and its authority was so powerful that it could cross party lines. Pope described the privileged discourse in his preface:

It only remains to speak of the Versification. Homer (as has been said) is perpetually applying the Sound to the Sense, and varying it on every new Subject. This is indeed one of the most exquisite Beauties of Poetry, and attainable by very few: I know only of Homer eminent for it in the Greek, and Virgil in Latine. I am sensible it is what may sometimes happen by Chance, when a Writer is warm, and fully possest of his Image: however it may be reasonably believed they designed this, in whose Verse it so manifestly appears in a superior degree to all others. Few Readers have the Ear to be Judges of it, but those who have will see I have endeavoured at this Beauty.

(Pope 1967:20–21)

Pope manifests the distinctive blind spot of domesticating translation, confusing, under the illusion of transparency, the interpretation/translation with the foreign text, even with the foreign writer’s intention, canonizing classical writing on the basis of Enlightenment concepts of poetic discourse, a metrical facility designed to reduce the signifier to a coherent signified, “perpetually applying the Sound to the Sense.” The fluency of Pope’s Homer set the standard for verse translations of classical poetry, so that, as Penelope Wilson notes,

we find the ancient poets emerging from the mill of decorum in more or less undifferentiated batches of smooth rhyme, or blank verse, and elegant diction. They are generally met by reviewers with correspondingly vague commendations such as ‘not less faithful than elegant’; and when they are condemned, they are more often condemned on stylistic grounds than on those of accuracy.

(Wilson 1982:80)

In the eighteenth century, stylistic elegance in a translation can already be seen as symptomatic of domestication, bringing the {67} ancient text in line with literary standards prevailing in Hanoverian Britain.

During this crucial moment in its cultural rise, domesticating translation was sometimes taken to extremes that look at once oddly comical and rather familiar in their logic, practices a translator might use today in the continuing dominion of fluency. William Guthrie, for instance, in the preface to his version of The Orations of Marcus Tallius Cicero (1741), argued that “it is living Manners alone that can communicate the Spirit of an Original” and so it is sufficient if the translator has made

it his Business to be as conversant as he cou’d in that Study and Manner which comes the nearest to what we may suppose his Author, were he now to live, wou’d pursue, and in which he wou’d shine.

(Steiner 1975:98)