The Translator’s Invisibility

He was so prolific because he felt that more was at stake in translating than literary appreciation, even though aesthetic values always guided his choices as well. The mimetic concept of translation that made him choose a foreignizing method to preserve the difference of the foreign text also made him think of his work as an act of cultural restoration. This was the rationale he often gave in his prefatory statements. His “Attempt to transfer unblemished into the English language the numberless Beauties with which the Basia of Secundus abound” was intended to draw “a deserving Author from that {94} Oblivion in which he has been so long buried” (Nott 1778:vii). Finding it “astonishing, considering his merit,” that Propertius had never been translated into English, Nott intended his version “to repair this neglect” (Nott 1782: iii–iv). For Nott, translation performed the work of cultural restoration by revising the canon of foreign literature in English, supporting the admission of some marginalized texts and occasionally questioning the canonicity of others. In his preface to his selection from the Persian poet Hafiz, Nott boldly challenged the English veneration of classical antiquity by suggesting that western European culture originated in the east:

we lament, whilst years are bestowed in acquiring an insight into the Greek and Roman authors, that those very writers should have been neglected, from whom the Greeks evidently derived both the richness of their mythology, and the peculiar tenderness of their expressions.

(Nott 1787:v–vi)

Nott attacked any Anglocentric dismissal of Oriental poets like Hafiz, arguing the importance of “not judging of the glow of Eastern dialogue by the standard of our colder feelings and ideas,” and he went so far as to suggest that “the more exact rules of English criticism and taste” were complicit in English imperialism:

Was it not probable to suppose, when a fatal ambition had determined us to possess a country, our distance from which made the attempt unnatural; and when, under the pretence of commerce, we became the cruel invaders of another’s right; that we should at least have made ourselves acquainted with the language of the conquered? This was necessary, whether to distribute justice, or to exercise compassion. But private avarice and extortion shut up the gates of public virtue.

(ibid.:vii)

Of course Nott’s foreignizing translation method could never be entirely free of domestic values and agendas, including the development of a national culture: he felt, for example, that the failure to translate Propertius caused “some degradation to English literature” (Nott 1782:iv). But he was sufficiently sensitive to the ethnocentric violence involved in any encounter with a cultural other to question the imposition of bourgeois canons and interests, whether at home, in {95} translations of foreign literary texts, or abroad, in economic and political relations with foreign countries.