The Translator’s Invisibility

It seems clear that only foreignizing translation could answer to Newman’s concept of liberal education, to his concern with the recognition of cultural differences. His introductory lecture argued that literary texts were particularly important in staging this recognition because “literature is special, peculiar; it witnesses, and it tends to uphold, national diversity” (Newman 1841:10). In the preface to his version of the Iliad, he offered a concise account of his translation method by contrasting it with the “principles which I regard to be utterly false and ruinous to translation.” The principles Newman opposed belonged to the fluent, domesticating method that dominated English translation since the seventeenth century:

One of these is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work. Of course a necessary inference from such a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour is undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in English. From such a notion I cannot too strongly express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite;—to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able, with the greater care, the more foreign it may happen to be,—whether it be a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals. […] the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native compositions.

(Newman 1856:xv–xvi)

For Newman, the “illusion” of originality that confused the translation with the foreign text was domesticating, assimilating what was foreign “to something already familiar in English.” He recommended a translation method that signified the many differences between the {122} translation and the foreign text, their relative autonomy from one another, their composition in different languages for different cultures. Yet rejecting the illusion of originality meant opposing the discourse that shapes most of “our native compositions”—fluency. Newman felt that his translations were resisting a contemporary standardization of English enforced by the publishing industry:

In the present day, so intensely mechanical is the apparatus of prose-composition,—when editors and correctors of the press desire the uniform observance of some one rule (never mind what, so that you find it in the “standard” grammar),—every deviation is resented as a vexatious eccentricity; and in general it would appear, that dry perspicuity is the only excellence for which the grammarian has struggled. Every expression which does not stand the logical test, however transparent the meaning, however justified by analogies, is apt to be condemned; and every difference of mind and mind, showing itself in the style, is deprecated.

(ibid.:xvii–xviii)