The Translator’s Invisibility

The ideological configuration of Newman’s writing uneasily combined liberalism with a paternalistic investment in bourgeois moral values, and this also played into his translation projects, which were fundamentally pedagogical and populist. He published Latin versions of the popular literature he assigned his students for class translation exercises: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem Hiawatha (1862) and Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1884). The readership he imagined for his translations of Horace (1853) and the Iliad (1856) did not know Latin and Greek or were too busy or bored to maintain languages they learned at university—in Newman’s words, “the unlearned English reader,” “those who seek solely for amusement,” including “men of business,” “commercial England,” but also the socially diverse audience of “Dickens and Thackeray” (Newman 1853:iii–v). Compared to Schleiermacher, Newman enlisted translation in a more democratic cultural politics, assigned a pedagogical function but pitched deliberately against an academic elite. For Newman, {120} the aim of education was to foster liberal democracy. In his lecture On the Relations of Free Knowledge to Moral Sentiment, he argued that the study of “political economy” teaches a respect for cultural differences that militates against imperialism, nationalism, and class domination:

political economy has demonstrated that the laws which morality would dictate as just are also the laws of physical well being for nations and for classes; that no cunning regulations will enable a State to prosper at the expense of foreigners; and that the interests of classes and of nations are so knit up, that one cannot permanently be depressed without injury to others. It rescues the patriot from the temptation of being unjust to the foreigner, by proving that that does not conduce to the welfare of his own people.

(Newman 1847b:18–19)

Newman similarly urged the study of history, literary as well as political, because it can “deepen our knowledge of mankind, and our insight into social and political interests” (ibid.:8). Here too the “practical uses” of this knowledge required the recognition of cultural differences. In Four Lectures on the Contrasts of Ancient and Modern History, Newman granted the central metaphysical assumption of Enlightenment humanism—“The whole interest of History depends upon the eternal likeness of human nature to itself”—but only to give it a more materialist revision, mindful of historical change: “it is equally needful to be aware of the points at which similarity ceases, and contrast begins; otherwise our applications of history to practical uses will be mere delusive pedantry” (Newman 1847a:5–6).

Newman’s “practical” concept of education led him to criticize academic specialization because it decreased the social value of knowledge. In his Introductory Lecture to the Classical Course at Manchester New College, he asserted that

we do not advocate any thing exclusive. A one-sided cultivation may appear at first like carrying out the principle of division of labour, yet in fact it does not tend even to the general benefit and progress of truth, much less to the advantage of the individual.

(Newman 1841:7)

Although intended to justify the place of classics in an academic curriculum, Newman’s lecture attacked the scholarly disdain of {121} translation, describing it as mere snobbery that ironically degraded classical literature by limiting its audience: “It would be no honor to the venerable productions of antiquity, to imagine that all their excellencies vanish with translation, and only a mean exclusiveness of spirit could grudge to impart as much as possible of their instruction to the unlearned” (ibid.:9). To Newman, “exclusive” meant specialized, but also elitist.