The Translator’s Invisibility

The most correct taste is requisite to prevent that ease from degenerating into licentiousness. […] The most licentious of all translators was Mr Thomas Brown, of facetious memory, in whose translations from Lucian we have the most perfect ease; but it is the ease of Billingsgate and of Wapping.

(ibid.:220–221)

{72} Ultimately, Tytler’s bourgeois valorization of transparent discourse to the exclusion of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque” reveals a class anxiety about the simulacral status of the translated text and the threat it poses to an individualistic concept of authorship (Bakhtin 1984). Stallybrass and White facilitate this critique of Tytler’s translation theory with their Bakhtinian history of the construction of authorship in England:

Jonson, Dryden, Pope and Wordsworth, each sought to legitimate his claim to the vocation of master-poet by disengaging himself from the carnivalesque scene so as to stand above it, taking up a singular position of transcendence. The traces of this labour, of this act of discursive rejection, are marked out by nothing so much as the poet’s attempt to found an illusory unity above and beyond the carnival. In each case, however, this apparently simple gesture of social superiority and disdain could not be effectively accomplished without revealing the very labour of suppression and sublimation involved.

(Stallybrass and White 1986:123–124)

Translation threatens the transcendental author because it submits his text to the infiltration of other discourses that are not bourgeois, individualistic, transparent. In Tytler’s case, there is a special concern that classical texts should not be carnivalized and degraded by translation strategies that do not implement canonical readings of those texts—colloquializing “the solemn and sententious Tacitus,” for example, or trashing the “strength united with simplicity” that is “characteristic of the language of Homer” by rendering his vulgarities. The very labour of suppression and sublimation involved in Tytler’s theory can be glimpsed in his willingness to risk compromising the canonicity of classical texts, admitting that they must be edited to fit his chastening, bourgeois readings of them. Insofar as Tytler’s neoclassicism comprehends a free translation method, it at once expresses and declares impossible a nostalgic dream of originality, the ancients’ proximity to “Nature,” representation and expression free of its discursive conditions.