The Translator’s Invisibility

This was Guthrie’s reason for casting his Cicero as a member of Parliament, “where,” he says, “by a constant Attendance, in which I was indulg’d for several Years, I endeavour’d to possess my self of the Language most proper for this translation” (ibid.:99). Guthrie’s translation naturalized the Latin text with the transparent discourse he developed as a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine.

It is important not to view such instances of domestication as simply inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy and fidelity are always locally defined, specific to different cultural formations at different historical moments. Both Denham and Dryden recognized that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs in the translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal relationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, always somewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and a supplement. Yet they also viewed their domesticating method as the most effective way to control this equivocal relationship and produce versions adequate to the Latin text. As a result, they castigated methods that either rigorously adhered to source-language textual features or played fast and loose with them in ways that they were unwilling to license, that insufficiently adhered to the canon of fluency in translation. Dryden “thought it fit to steer betwixt the two Extreams, of Paraphrase, and literal Translation” (Dryden 1958:1055), i.e., between the aim of {68} reproducing primarily the meanings of the Latin text, usually at the cost of its phonological and syntactical features, and the aim of rendering it word for word, respecting syntax and line break. And he distinguished his method from Abraham Cowley’s “imitations” of Pindar, partial translations that revised and, in effect, abandoned the foreign text. Dryden felt it was Denham “who advis’d more Liberty than he took himself” (Dryden 1956:117), permitting Denham’s substantial liberties—the editing of the Latin text, the domestic lexicon—to pass unnoticed, refined out of existence, naturalized by the majesty of the style. The ethnocentric violence performed by domesticating translation rested on a double fidelity, to the source-language text as well as to the target-language culture, and especially to its valorization of transparent discourse. But this was clearly impossible and knowingly duplicitous, accompanied by the rationale that a gain in domestic intelligibility and cultural force outweighed the loss suffered by the foreign text and culture.

This trend in English-language translation gets pushed to a new extreme at the end of the eighteenth century, in Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791). Tytler’s influential treatise is a key document in the canonization of fluency, a digest of its “principles,” “laws,” and “precepts” which offers a plethora of illustrative examples. His decisive consolidation of earlier statements, French as well as English, constituted a theoretical refinement, visible in the precision of his distinctions and in the philosophical sophistication of his assumptions: domestication is now recommended on the basis of a general human nature that is repeatedly contradicted by an aesthetic individualism.

For Tytler, the aim of translation is the production of an equivalent effect that transcends linguistic and cultural differences:

I would therefore describe a good translation to be, That, in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.

(Tytler 1978:15)