The Translator’s Invisibility

the more correct moral feeling of modern times, would never permit a complete version of many of those objectionable passages in which he abounds. This portion of his task Mr Lamb has executed with considerable judgment, and we need not fear that our delicacy may be wounded in perusing the pages of his translation.

(Monthly Magazine 1821:34)

The reactionary Anti-Jacobin Review enlisted Lamb in its struggle against the opponents of church, state, and nation:

The extreme impropriety of many Poems written by Catullus, has obliged Mr Lamb to omit them, and had he turned his attention wholly to some purer author, it would have honoured his powers of selection. At this hour of contest between the good and evil principle among us, when so many are professedly Atheists, and blasphemy is encouraged by subscription, and sedition supported by charities, no patriot and christian would assist vice by palliating its excesses, or render them less offensive by a decent veil. […] Mr Lamb is entitled to both the above characters of patriot and christian.

(Anti-Jacobin Review 1821:14)

{93} Reviewers also faulted Nott’s translation for lacking fluency. The Monthly Review remarked that “we would praise this translator for his general correctness with respect to the English version, yet his inattention to rhime is too gross and too frequent not to incur censure” (Monthly Review 1797:278). The British Critic complained of “great irregularities both with regard to the spirit, correctness, and harmony” (British Critic 1798:671–672). Lamb’s prosody was apparently not spirited enough for several reviewers—his versions of the “minor pieces” get described as “languid,” or devoid of “poetical ease and beauty”—but at least one magazine, the Monthly Review, found that he “preserved no small portion of the spirit and dignity of the original,” singling out Lamb’s rendering of Carmen V for special praise as “the best which we have seen, with the exception only of Ben Jonson’s,” recognizing Lamb’s Catullus as a peculiarly English phenomenon, indicative of the dominance of fluency in poetry translation (Monthly Review 1822:11, 9).

We can more fully understand the translators’ different motives and methods by considering their translations in the context of their other work, their lives, and their different historical moments. A practicing physician who was constantly engaged in literary projects, Nott (1751–1825) published a number of books that drew impressively on the tradition of the love lyric in classical, European, and Oriental languages (Gentleman’s Magazine 1825:565–566; DNB). Late in his career, he wrote a prose romance entitled Sappho (1803), made a selection from Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1810), and edited a miscellany of sixteenth-century English poetry beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1812). The bulk of his work, however, was translation, and over a thirty-year period he produced book-length translations of Johannes Secundus Nicolaius (1775), Petrarch (1777), Propertius (1782), Hafiz (1787), Bonefonius (1797), Lucretius (1799), and Horace (1803). The Catullus translation (1795) was an obvious choice for a translator with Nott’s interests and energies.