The Translator’s Invisibility

concluding that the Latin texts should continue to be censored: Many things more might be brought to shew the allowableness of this practice among the Greeks as well as Romans; but as we think it in the highest degree criminal and offensive in itself, and of most pernicious consequence to the Readers, especially the youth of both sexes, into whose hands such pieces may happen to fall, we shall say no more on this Head.

(ibid.:29)

The appearance of two complete translations of Catullus’s poetry within roughly a generation signalled a revision of the classical canon in English, the emergence of a new taste for short poems, mainly epigrams and lyrics, and especially those of an erotic nature. The cultural and social factors that made this revision possible included, not any relaxation of bourgeois moral norms, but the canonization of transparency in English poetry and poetry translation. Crusius had sounded this note early when he praised the “easy unaffected elegance and pleasantry that enlivens this Poet’s Style” (Crusius 1733:28). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Catullus’s poetry was routinely assimilated to transparent discourse, considered to offer an especially strong effect of authorial presence, and this occasionally weakened the critics’ prudery, leading them to mitigate the coarse language they found so offensive. The work of rehabilitation was evident in Charles Abraham Elton’s Specimens of the Classic Poets (1814), a three-volume anthology of verse translations from Greek and Latin. Elton felt that Catullus’s poetry was rather thin—“pieces of gallantry or satirical epigrams, with a few poems of a more elevated cast”—but he excused this defect by assuming that “much of the poetry of Catullus appears to have been lost” (Elton 1814:I, 30–31). What recommends the extant texts is their “ease” and “simplicity”:

They, who turn with disgust from the coarse impurities that sully his pages, may be inclined to wonder, that the term of delicacy should ever have been coupled with the name of Catullus. But to many of his effusions, distinguished both by fancy and feeling, this praise is justly due. Many of his amatory trifles are quite unrivalled in the elegancy of their playfulness; and no author has excelled him in the purity and neatness of his style, the delightful ease and racy {84} simplicity of his manner, and his graceful turns of thought and happinesses of expression. Some of his pieces, which breathe the higher enthusiasm of the art, and are coloured with a singular picturesqueness of imagery, increase our regret at the manifest mutilation of his works.

(ibid.:ll:31)

In 1818, Blackwood’s published an essay that remarked on the fluency of Catullus’s verse, finding it a mirror of the poet: “This language is uniformly unlaboured. […] His versification is careless, but graceful. His feeling is weak, but always true. The poet has no inclination to appear any thing but what he is” (Blackwood’s 1818:487). The essayist then ventured to connect Catullus to a canonical English figure, suggesting that the “obscenity is seldom introduced altogether for its own sake. Like that of Swift, it is only the weapon of satire” (ibid.:488). The final verdict, however, was