The Translator’s Invisibility

By the turn of the nineteenth century, a translation method of eliding the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text was firmly entrenched as a canon in English-language translation, always linked to a valorization of transparent discourse. The canonicity of domesticating translation was so far beyond question that it survived the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere, “now much less one of bland consensus than of ferocious contention,” in which English literary periodicals constituted cultural factions with explicit political {77} positions (Eagleton 1984:37). In 1820, John Hookham Frere, who would later publish his own translations of Aristophanes, unfavorably reviewed Thomas Mitchell’s versions of The Acharnians and The Knights in the staunchly conservative Quarterly Review, Tory defender of neoclassical literary theory and the traditional authority of aristocracy and the Anglican Church (Sullivan 1983b:359–367). For Frere, the principal “defect” of Mitchell’s translation was that it cultivated an archaic dramatic discourse, “the style of our ancient comedy in the beginning of the 16th century,” whereas the language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more; it ought never to attract attention to itself; hence all phrases that are remarkable in themselves, either as old or new; all importations from foreign languages and quotations, are as far as possible to be avoided. […] such phrases as [Mitchell] has sometimes admitted, ‘solus cum solo,’ for instance, ‘petits pates,’ &c. have the immediate effect of reminding the reader, that he is reading a translation, and […] the illusion of originality, which the spirited or natural turn of a sentence immediately preceding might have excited, is instantly dissipated by it. (Frere 1820:481) Frere advocated the now familiar fluent strategy, in which the language of the translation is made to read with a “spirited or natural turn,” so that the absence of any syntactical and lexical peculiarities produces the “illusion” that the translation is not a translation, but the foreign text, reflecting the foreign writer’s intention: “It is the office, we presume, of the Translator to represent the forms of language according to the intention with which they are employed” (ibid.:482). The reviewer for the Edinburgh Review, a magazine whose liberal, Whiggish politics called the Quarterly Review into existence, nonetheless agreed that Mitchell’s Aristophanes was defective, and for the same reason: he “devoted too much time to working in the mines of our early dramatists, instead of undergoing the greater trouble it would have cost him to form a style of his own more suited to the exigency” (Edinburgh Review 1820:306).[12] The reviewer defined this “exigency” in terms of the stylistic feature repeatedly attributed to classical texts throughout the eighteenth century, asserting that “simplicity should never be forgotten in a translation of Aristophanes” {78} (ibid.:307). Yet the reviewer also suggested that the simplicity should be considered a feature of Mitchell’s style as well (“a style of his own”), showing unwittingly that fluent translation domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible in an English-language culture that values easy readability, transparent discourse, the illusion of authorial presence.

Once again, the domestication enacted by a fluent strategy was not seen as producing an inaccurate translation. The usually contentious periodicals agreed that William Stewart Rose’s 1823 version of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was both fluent and faithful. Blackwood’s, a magazine that pursued Tory conservatism to reactionary extremes, called Rose’s translation “a work which, of necessity, addresses itself to the more refined classes,” since “never was such scrupulous fidelity of rendering associated with such light dancing elegance of language” (Blackwood’s 1823:30).[13] The London Magazine, which sought to maintain an independent neutrality amid its politically factious competitors, similarly found that Rose “generally combined the garrulous ease and unpremeditated manner of the original with a terse and equable flow of numbers” (London Magazine 1824:626; Sullivan 1983b:288–296). The Quarterly Review took Rose’s version as an opportunity to restate the canons of fluent translation: