The Translator’s Invisibility

The canonization of fluency in English-language translation during the early modern period limited the translator’s options and defined their cultural and political stakes. A translator could choose the now traditional domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to dominant cultural values in English; or a translator could choose a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the values in question, although stated somewhat contradictorily in various treatises, translators’ prefaces, and reviews, were decidedly bourgeois—liberal and humanist, individualistic and elitist, morally conservative and physically squeamish. The ways in which they constrained the translator’s activity, the forms of submission and resistance that a translator might adopt under their domination, become strikingly evident with the first book-length translations of Catullus into English, the versions of Dr John Nott (1795) and the Honourable George Lamb (1821).

Before these translations appeared, Catullus had long occupied a foothold in the canon of classical literature in English. Editions of the Latin text were available on the Continent after the fifteenth century, and even though two more centuries passed before it was published in England, Catullus had already been imitated by a wide range of English poets—Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller, Robert Herrick, among many others (McPeek 1939; Wiseman 1985:chap. VII). Still, Catullus’s place in English literary culture, {82} even if supported by such culturally prominent writers, was rather minor. There were few translations, usually of the same small group of kiss and sparrow poems, showing quite clearly that he was virtually neglected by English translators in favor of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace: these were the major figures, translated in the service of diverse aesthetic, moral, and political interests. Catullus’s marginality was partly an issue of genre, with epic privileged over lyric in English poetry translation during this period. But there was also the issue of morality, with English writers at once attracted and disturbed by the pagan sexuality and the physically coarse language, entertaining a guilty fixation on the poet’s scandalous affair with “Lesbia.”

The first substantial selected translation, the anonymous Adventures of Catullus, and History of His Amours with Lesbia (1707), was itself a translation from the French, Jean de la Chapelle’s Les Amours de Catulle. It consisted of several narrative sections, some in the voices of Catullus and Lesbia, punctuated by versions of the Latin texts, all arranged to support “a train of Historical Conjectures [which] have so great a foundation in the poet’s own Verses” (The Adventures of Catullus 1707:A2r). For the English editor, the book was didactic, “one of the severest Lessons against our Passions and Vices”; but since it was described as “a just Representation of the Nobility of Antient Rome, in a private Life, in their Friendships, Conversation, and Manners within Doors,” the editor was also assimilating Roman aristocratic culture to bourgeois values like emotional intimacy and moral propriety and perhaps questioning the “private life” of the British aristocracy: the book was dedicated to the earl of Thomond (ibid.:A2v–A3v). In his Lives of the Roman Poets (1733), Lewis Crusius, anxiously feeling the need for a “justification of this Writer [who] has been very much censured for the Lewdness of some of his Pieces,” asked the English reader to respect the historical and cultural difference of Catullus’s poetry, its different sexual morality:

We would not be understood by any means to vindicate this conduct in our Author, but barely to shew, that Obscenity, according to the Antients, was not only allowable in these sorts of Compositions, but when artfully drest up, was esteemed one of its greatest beauties.

(Crusius 1733:28)

{83} In the end, however, Crusius bared only his moral refinement,