The Translator’s Invisibility

Since Newman developed his foreignizing method in the translation of classical texts, for him foreignizing necessarily involved a discourse that signified historical remoteness—archaism. In the preface to his selection from Horace, he faulted previous English versions because they modernized the Latin text: “Hitherto our poetical translators have failed in general, not so much from want of talent or learning, but from aiming to produce poems in modern style, through an excessive fear that a modern reader will endure nothing else” (Newman 1853:iv). In the preface to his Iliad, Newman defined more precisely the sort of archaism Homer required. Partly it was an effort to suggest an historical analogy between earlier forms of Greek and English: “The entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translation ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning” (Newman 1856:vi). Homer’s “style” required a like solution: “it is similar to the old English ballad, and is in sharp contrast to the polished style of Pope, Sotheby, and Cowper, the best known English translators of Homer” (ibid.:iv).

Yet Newman also made clear that he was “not concerned with the historical problem, of writing in a style which actually existed at an {123} earlier period in our language; but with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible” (Newman 1856:x). Hence, he advocated an artificially constructed archaism, patched together without an excessive regard for historical accuracy or consistency, producing an effect that he called “quaint” as opposed to “grotesque.” And he cultivated this discourse on various levels, in the lexicon, syntax, and prosody of his translations. He explained his use of syntactical “inversions,” for example, as “not mere metrical expedients, but necessities of the style; partly, to attain antiquity and elevation, partly for emphasis or for variety” (ibid.:xi).

Newman’s translations could only be foreignizing in a culturally specific sense, in relation to concepts of “domestic” and “foreign” that distinguished English literary culture in the Victorian period. Thus, he saw nothing inconsistent in faulting the modernizing tendencies of previous Horace translators while he himself expurgated the Latin text, inscribing it with an English sense of moral propriety. This is where Newman’s bourgeois paternalism contradicts the democratic tendencies of his populism:

I have striven to make this book admissable to the purest-minded English lady, and could never consent to add adornment to a single line of corrupting tendency. It exhibits, no doubt, mournful facts concerning the relations of the sexes in Augustan Rome,—facts not in themselves so shocking, as many which oppress the heart in the cities of Christendom; and this, I think, it is instructive to perceive. Only in a few instances, where the immorality is too ugly to be instructive have I abruptly cut away the difficulty. In general, Horace aimed at a higher beauty than did Catullus or Propertius or Ovid, and the result of a purer taste is closely akin to that of a sounder morality.

(Newman 1853:vi)