The Translator’s Invisibility

In 1821, Lamb possessed a more contemporary, romantic sense of authorial authenticity that projected an expressive concept of translation as adequately communicating the foreign author’s psychological state. Catullus’s “compositions, few as they are, probably express his feelings upon every important event of his short career,” Lamb believed, and this led him to conclude that the Latin poet “seems to have been as little sullied by the grossness of the age, as was possible […] pure indeed must that mind naturally have been, which, amidst such coarseness of manners, could preserve so much expressive delicacy and elevated refinement” (Lamb 1821: I, xlii–xliii). Lamb’s expressive poetics underwrote not only his belief in the poet’s purity, both moral and stylistic, but also his advocacy of a free translation method that effected the illusion of transparency while domesticating the Latin text. Explicitly situating himself in the main tradition of fluent translation from Denham to Johnson, Lamb stated that “the natural course of translation is, first to secure its fidelity, and then to attempt the polish of elegance and freedom” (ibid.:lviii). Hence, {86} he handled the “objectionable expressions” by developing strategies of “omission and amplification,” recognizing “the necessity of making every attempt to veil and soften before entire omission could be justified,” revising on the assumption that Catullus was “a genius orignally pure, however polluted by the immorality of its era” (ibid.:lix, xli).

Lamb’s translation submitted to the bourgeois values that dominated English culture, inscribing the Latin text with a conservative morality and a fetish for transparent poetic discourse. Nott worked under the same cultural regime, but he rather chose to resist those values in the name of preserving the difference of the Latin text. Nott foreignized Catullus, although foreignization does not mean that he somehow transcended his own historical moment to reproduce the foreign, unmediated by the domestic. On the contrary, if Nott’s translation presented any element of Roman culture during the late Republic, it could only be in English-language cultural terms, making the foreign here not so much “Roman” as a marked deviation from current English values.

The various aspects of Nott’s foreignized Catullus stand out conspicuously against Lamb’s domestication. Nott’s bilingual edition, intended to give “the whole of Catullus without reserve” (Nott 1795:I, x), consisted of 115 poems attributed to the Latin poet; Lamb’s English-only edition included 84 (Lamb 1821). Nott translated texts that referred to adulterous affairs and homosexual relationships, as well as texts that contained descriptions of sexual acts, especially anal and oral intercourse. Lamb either omitted or bowdlerized them, preferring more refined expressions of hetero-sexual love that glanced fleetingly at sexual activity. Catullus’s satiric epigram on the “Verbenni,” for instance, is a poem that Lamb excluded. Here is the Latin text with Nott’s translation:

O furum optime balneariorum
Vibenni pater et cineade fili,
(nam dextra pater inquinatiore,
culo filius est voraciore)
cur non exilium malasque in oras
itis? quandoquidem patris rapinae
notae sunt populo, et natis pilosas,
fili, non potes asse venditare.

{87} Old Vibennius of all your bath-rogues is the first;
Nor less noted his boy for unnatural lust:
The hands of the former are ever rapacious,
The latter’s posterior is full as voracious:
Then, o why don’t ye both into banishment go,
And deservedly wander in deserts of woe?
Not a soul but the fathers mean rapines must tell;
And thou, son, canst no longer thy hairy breech sell.

(Nott 1795:I, 90–91)