The Translator’s Invisibility

What was foreignizing about Newman’s translations was not their morality, but their literary discourse, the strangeness of the archaism. This too was homegrown, a rich stew drawn from various periods of English, but it deviated from current usage and cut across various literary discourses, poetry and the novel, elite and popular, English and Scottish. Newman’s Horace translation contained “viands,” for example, a word that surfaced at the beginning of the fifteenth century and was used extensively in the {124} early modern period in various kinds of writing, literary (Shakespeare’s plays) and nonliterary (Edward Hall’s historical chronicles). Yet it was also used later as a distinctly poetic form, a poeticism, in widely read Victorian writers like Tennyson and Dickens.[9] Newman’s archaic lexicon crossed, not only historical periods, but contemporary reading constituencies. The word “eld” appeared in his Horace translation after a succession of different uses—in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery (1820), Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847).

Newman’s version of the Iliad increased the density of the archaism, so that what may have been a recognizable poeticism now risked opacity and reader incomprehension. As if anticipating this risk, Newman appended a two-page “glossary” to the translation that provided his definitions for the archaic words. The glossary was a scholarly gesture that indicated the sheer heterogeneity of his lexicon, its diverse literary origins, and his readers no doubt found it useful when they took up other books, in various genres, periods, dialects. Newman used “callant” (“a young man”), an eighteenthcentury word that appeared in Scott’s Waverley (1814), and “gride” (“to cut gratingly”), a Spenserianism that appeared in Shelley’s Prometheus Bound (1821) and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). A brief catalogue suggests the inventiveness of Newman’s lexicon, its historical and cultural breadth, but also its occasional impenetrability: “behight,” “bragly” (“braw, proudly fine”), “bulkin” (“calf”), “choler,” “emprize,” “fain,” “gramsome” (“direful”), “hie,” “lief,” “noisome,” “ravin,” “sith,” “whilom,” “wight,” “wend.” There were even some Scottish words drawn from Burns and Scott, like “skirl,” meaning “to cry shrilly,” and “syne,” as in “lang syne” (“long ago”).

The foreignizing discourse of Newman’s translations definitely registered on contemporary readers. The London Quarterly Review included Newman’s Horace in two review essays that surveyed English versions of the odes, past and present. Although these essays were published more than fifteen years apart (1858 and 1874), they both disapproved of Newman’s strategies and expressed a preference for a modernized Horace, rendered fluently, in immediately intelligible English:

It is an all-prevading and persistent fault in this translation, that obscure and antiquated forms of expression are used, instead of {125} simple and modern English. Thus we find, in the very first Ode, such expressions as “Lydian eld,” “quirital mob.” Elsewhere we find such phrases as “tangled fields” (whatever this means), “the sage thrice-aged.”

(London Quarterly Review 1874:17)

This was a criticism that crossed political lines, appearing not only in the Tory London Quarterly, but the liberal National Review, to which Newman was a contributor (Sullivan 1984:237–242). The reviewer of Newman’s Iliad for the National expressed some agreement with him, admitting that “a style in some sort archaic is no doubt desirable, and even necessary, to represent a poet such as Homer” (National Review 1860:292). But Newman’s archaism was attacked for deviating too far from the familiar, the transparent: