The Translator’s Invisibility

For Tytler, the threat posed by translation to the author’s transcendence is answered by liberal humanism, the contradiction between a general human nature and the individualist aesthetics embodied in the concept of “correct taste.” His explicit intention is to address “the subject of translation considered as an art, depending on {73} fixed principles” (Tytler 1978:4, my italics). The translator with “correct taste” is in fact an artist, an author: “none but a poet can translate a poet” (ibid.:208); “an ordinary translator sinks under the energy of his original; the man of genius frequently rises above it” (ibid.:42). And it is transparency that signifies the translator’s authorship in the text: the ease of originality occurs in “specimens of perfect translation, where the authors have entered with exquisite taste into the manner of their originals” (ibid.:142). The translator’s authorship hinges on a sympathetic identification with the foreign author—“to use a bold expression, [the translator] must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs” (ibid.:212)—but in the translation what gets expressed is less the foreign author’s “soul” than the translator’s: “With what superior taste has the translator heightened this simile, and exchanged the offending circumstance for a beauty”; “in such instances, the good taste of the translator invariably covers the defect of the original” (ibid.:89, 88). The anxiety that translation complicates authorial selfexpression by mediating the foreign text with “low” discourses is allayed by Tytler’s erasure of the distinction between translator and author, largely on the basis of an illusionistic effect of textuality, now the sign of “correct taste.”

Tytler (1747–1813), a Scottish lord who practiced law and pursued various historical, literary, and philosophical interests, published his treatise anonymously in 1791 and then issued two more editions, in 1797 and 1813, expanding the book to more than three times its initial size by adding many, many examples, driven by the empiricist conviction that they would make his concept of “taste” seem true, right, obvious. The treatise was very favorably received by reviewers and readers, confirming Tytler’s sense that he was addressing a public sphere of cultural consensus, even if that sphere was limited to a like-minded bourgeois literary elite.[11] The European Magazine, which announced itself as “a general Vehicle, by which the literati of the Whole Kingdom may converse with each other and communicate their Knowledge to the World,” concluded its review “with wonder at the variety of our Author’s reading, with praise of the justness of his judgment and the elegance of his taste” (European Magazine 1793:282). Tytler’s treatise prompted the Monthly Review to reflect on “the gradual progress of taste among our English writers” as evidenced in the rise of fluent translation (Monthly Review 1792:361). The anonymous reviewer asserted that “the author’s observations are, {74} for the most part, so evidently dictated by good sense, and so consonant to correct taste, as to admit of little dispute; and the examples, by which they are illustrated, are very judiciously selected and properly applied,” “sufficient to convince every reader of good taste, that the volume will repay the trouble of a diligent perusal of the whole” (ibid.:363, 366).

Although both of these reviewers expressed some doubts about Tytler’s recommendation that the translator edit or “improve” the foreign text, neither found this editing questionable because of the domestication it involved. On the contrary, the question was the specific nature of the domestication, with both offering reasons firmly grounded in domestic translation agendas. The reviewer for the Monthly Review suggested that Tytler’s “improvements” of the foreign text might interfere with the improvement of taste performed by translation, “the great end of which undoubtedly is to give the unlearned reader a correct idea of the merit of the original” (Monthly Review 1792:363). The reviewer for the European Magazine was less didactic but equally snobbish in his wish to preserve the classical text in a pure, unmediated state: “Such ornaments appear to us like modern gilding laid upon one of the finest statues of antiquity” (European Magazine 1792:188). This antiquarianism, although based on an idealized concept of the past, was actually serving contemporary social interests, labouring, somewhat contradictorily, under the valorization of transparent discourse in elite literary culture, recommending translations that seem to reproduce the foreign text perfectly: “the sober sense of criticism […] bids a translator to be the faithful mirror of his original” (ibid.:189).