The Translator’s Invisibility

Compared to Nott’s, Lamb’s translation is distinguished by an extreme fluency: the quatrains unwind quickly, driven by a smoothly varied trochaic meter, and they parcel out the meaning in precise syntactical {91} units, recurring with a regularity that threatens to call attention to its artificial quality, but remains unobtrusive, easy, light. Lamb’s additions to the Latin text at once make more explicit the sexual nature of the theme (“burn”) and point to the lovers’ modesty (“blushing”), a contradiction that is symptomatic of the translator’s labor of domestication. Lamb’s version, unlike Nott’s, is cast as a seduction (“Love, my Lesbia”) and thus follows the traditional English treatment of the Latin text: in Jonson’s Volpone (1605), for instance, an imitation of Catullus’s poem is used by Volpone to seduce the chaste Celia. And since Lamb’s “greybeards,” unlike Nott’s “age,” reproduces the male gender that Catullus assigns to the voice of morality, the relationship between the lovers takes on the form of a family romance, with the male lover locked in an oedipal struggle against the patriarchs for control over Lesbia’s sexuality. Lamb’s final stanza borrows another of Nott’s rhymes (“amount” / “count”), and once again this borrowing reveals the different values shaping their translations: in Nott’s, the kissing is seen by the envious (“beholding”), the affair treated as public knowledge, whereas in Lamb’s the kissing seems to be shielded by privacy (“none shall know,” “none shall ever count”). Both versions domesticate the Latin text to some degree, most obviously in their choice of verse form and their use of “farthing” to render the Latin for a bronze coin (“assis”); but Lamb’s is traced by various bourgeois values—fluency, moral propriety, the patriarchal family, privacy— whereas Nott’s constitutes a significant deviation, if not simply a violation of them.

This is in fact the reading that emerges in a survey of contemporary responses to the translations. In the late 1790s, Nott’s seemed so foreign to English tastes, it provided such an uncomfortably alien reading experience, that it was repeatedly damned on moral and stylistic grounds. The reviewer for the Gentleman’s Magazine made clear how moral offense could be a bourgeois gesture of social superiority by linking Nott’s translation to the popular taste for the Gothic novel, its sensationalized sexuality: “How any man could have presumed to debauch the minds of his countrymen by translating ‘indecencies so frequent in this lascivious poet, which the chaste reader must think best omitted,’ […] is a problem which only those who have read such novels as ‘The Monk’ can solve” (Gentleman’s Magazine 1798:408).

The disapproval of Nott’s “lascivious” translation was general in the literary periodicals, crossing factional lines and thus revealing their common bourgeois assumptions. The British Critic, a Tory magazine started by Anglican clergymen who opposed parliamentary {92} reform, asserted that “We object, from moral principles, to the translator’s plan” and insisted that the translation “should be sedulously removed from youth and from females” (British Critic 1798:672); whereas the liberal Monthly Review added a carefully worded comment that at once admitted the possibility of another reading of Catullus and refused to sanction it: “though we may appear fastidious to the present translator, we confess that in our opinion a judicious selection of his poems would have been more acceptable to the public” (Monthly Review 1797:278).[15] Nott’s translation was neglected by the periodicals, with the first reviews appearing several years after publication and in very small number. Lamb’s translation was widely reviewed as soon as it was published; and even though judgments were mixed, they were stated in the same bourgeois terms and tended to be much more favorable than Nott’s. The usually contentious reviewers turned not so much nonpartisan, as class-conscious in their embrace of Lamb’s version. The liberal Monthly Magazine, which announced itself in its first number as “an enterprise on behalf of intellectual liberty against the forces of panic conservatism” (Sullivan 1983b:314–319), praised Lamb’s expurgation of Catullus’s text: