The Translator’s Invisibility

The principle on which Frere’s theory rests is the principle that can now be recognized as central to the history of fluent translation: liberal humanism, subjectivity seen as at once self-determining and determined by human nature, individualistic yet generic, transcending cultural difference, social conflict, and historical change to represent “every shade of the human character” (Frere 1820:481). And, like preceding versions of this principle, Frere’s may appear to be democratic in its appeal to what is “common to mankind,” to a {80} timeless and universal human essence, but it actually involved an insidious domestication that allowed him to imprint the foreign text with his conservative sexual morality and cultural elitism. He made plain his squeamishness about the physical coarseness of Aristophanic humor, its grotesque realism, and felt the need to explain it away as inconsistent with the author’s intention: the “lines of extreme grossness” were “forced compromises,” “which have evidently been inserted, for the purpose of pacifying the vulgar part of the audience, during passages in which their anger, or impatience, or disappointment, was likely to break out” (ibid.:491). Hence, “in discarding such passages,” Frere asserted, “the translator is merely doing that for his author, which he would willingly have done for himself”—were he not “often under the necessity of addressing himself exclusively to the lower class” (ibid.:491), Frere’s advocacy of a fluent strategy was premised on a bourgeois snobbery, in which the moral and political conservatism now ascendant in English culture resulted in a call for a bowdlerized Aristophanes that represented the “permanent” class divisions of humanity, what Frere described as “that true comic humour which he was directing to the more refined and intelligent part of his audience” (ibid.:491). For Frere, “the persons of taste and judgment, to whom the author occasionally appeals, form, in modern times, the tribunal to which his translator must address himself” (ibid.:491).

The Edinburgh Review criticized Mitchell’s Aristophanes on the basis of similar philosophical and political assumptions, although formulated with an explicitly “liberal” difference. The reviewer’s Aristophanes approached his audience with a democratic inclusiveness—“The smiles of the polite few were not enough for the comedian,—he must join them to the shouts of the million”—and since “for all tastes he had to cater,” the playwright came to assume several social functions, “Public Satirist,” “State Journalist,” “Periodical Critic” (Edinburgh Review 1820:280)—an Aristophanes modelled on the Edinburgh’s own self-image as a liberal magazine. Unlike Frere, this reviewer sighs with relief that Mitchell “does not mean to publish a Family Aristophanes,” alluding to the title of Thomas Bowdler’s expurgated edition of Shakespeare (Bowdler 1818), and no offense was taken at Mitchell’s language. The problem for the Edinburgh reviewer was rather Mitchell’s description of Aristophanes’ “audience as usually made up of a mere ‘rabble,’ ripe for nothing but ‘the nonsense of holiday revelry,’ and totally unfit to appreciate merit of an higher order” (Edinburgh Review 1820:275).

{81} Here the reviewer’s “liberal” stance reveals the same contradiction between humanism and cultural elitism that emerged in Frere: Aristophanic comedy “could not be altogether without attractions for the philosophic mind, that explores the principles of human nature, or the cultivated taste, that delights in the triumph of genius” (ibid.:277). Not unexpectedly, the “qualities” that distinguish Aristophanes as “somewhat above the coarse apprehension of a mere mob, and fit to gain applause more precious than the unintellectual roar of plebeian acclamation,” are characteristic of transparent discourse: “both clear and perspicuous,—terse and yet magnificent,—powerful and ethical,” “that unfailing fluency and copiousness” (ibid.:278, 282).

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