The Translator’s Invisibility

Good translators implement fluent strategies: they avoid syntactical fragmentation, polysemy (“which, by the bye, is always a defect in composition” (Tytler 1978:28)), sudden shifts in discursive registers. Tytler praises Henry Steuart, “Esq.,” “the ingenious translator of Sallust,” for his “version of a most difficult author, into easy, pure, correct, and often most eloquent language”; Steuart recognized “the fruitlessness of any attempt to imitate the abrupt and sententious manner” of the Latin text (ibid.:188–189). Of Arthur Murphy’s Tacitus, Tytler remarks, “We most admire the judgment of the translator in forbearing all attempt to rival the brevity of the original, since he knew it could not be attained but with the sacrifice both of ease and perspicuity” (ibid.:186–187). “To imitate the obscurity or ambiguity of the original, is a fault; and it is still a greater, to give more than one meaning” (ibid.:28–29). Thomas May and George Sandys “manifested a better taste in poetical translation” because they “have given to their versions [of Lucan and Ovid] both an ease of expression and a harmony of numbers, which make them approach very near to original composition,” masking both the second-order status of the translation and its domestication of the foreign text. For these translators who produced the sense of originality “have everywhere adapted their expression to the idiom of the language in which they wrote” (ibid.:68). The governing “precept,” Tytler states, is “That the translator ought always to figure to himself, in what manner the original author would have expressed himself, if he had written in the language of the translation” (ibid.:201). But the translator must also conceal the figural status of the translation, indeed confuse the domesticated figure with the foreign writer.

Tytler’s recommendations of fluency lead to the inscription of the foreign text with a rather conservative set of social representations. These include a squeamishness about physical references that enables his concept of “correct taste” to function as a cultural discourse by which the bourgeoisie and a bourgeois aristocracy express their superiority to {71} lower classes. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown,

within the symbolic discourse of the bourgeoisie, illness, disease, poverty, sexuality, blasphemy and the lower classes were inextricably connected. The control of the boundaries of the body (in breathing, eating, defecating) secured an identity which was constantly played out in terms of class difference.

(Stallybrass and White 1986:167)

Thus, Tytler finds that Homer betrays a tendency “to offend, by introducing low images and puerile allusions. Yet how admirably is this defect veiled over, or altogether removed, by his translator Pope” (Tytler 1978:79). Pope is praised for omitting “an impropriety,” Homer’s “compliment to the nurse’s waist”—in Tytler’s translation her “waist was elegantly girt”—as well as “one circumstance extremely mean, and even disgusting,” a “nauseous image” of Achilles as a child: in Tytler’s translation, “When I placed you on my knees, I filled you full with meat minced down, and gave you wine, which you vomited upon my bosom” (ibid.:49–50, 89–90). At other points, the process of domestication is explicitly class-coded, with the translator advised to inscribe the foreign text with elite literary discourses while excluding discourses that circulate among an urban proletariat:

If we are thus justly offended at hearing Virgil speak in the style of the Evening Post or the Daily Advertiser, what must we think of the translator, who makes the solemn and sententious Tacitus express himself in the low cant of the streets, or in the dialect of the waiters of a tavern?

(ibid.:119)

Transparency, the “ease of original composition” in translation, was a genteel literary effect that avoided the “licentiousness” of popular oral genres: