The Translator’s Invisibility

we cannot but consider that Mr Newman’s diction is needlessly antiquated and uncouth; and that, although he has not admitted any expressions which are unintelligible from their antiquity, he has omitted to observe the further caution, that archaism should not appear plainly to be constrained or assumed, lest a laboured, artificial style of English should suggest the idea of a laboured, artificial style of Greek, than which nothing can be more opposite to Homer.

(ibid.:292)

The reviewer preferred a reading experience that allowed the English version to pass as a true equivalent of “Homer” while repressing the status of Newman’s text as a translation, the sense that the archaism was calculated by the translator, “assumed.”

As this passage suggests, however, Newman’s translations seemed foreign, not only because their “strained archaic quaintness” preempted the illusion of transparency, but also because they constituted a reading of the foreign text that revised prevailing critical opinion. Newman’s decision to translate Horace into unrhymed verse with various accentual meters ignored what the London Quarterly Review called “the dignity and the music of the Latin,” “the grace and sweetness of the original” (London Quarterly Review 1858:192; 1874:18). As a result, Newman’s version appeared “somewhat quaint and harsh,” whereas “the rhymed versions of Lord Ravensworth and of Mr Theodore Martin” possessed “the qualities of easy elegance, of sweetness of cadence” (London Quarterly Review 1858:192–3; 1874:16, 19). The reviewers looked for a fluent, iconic meter, sound imitating {126} sense to produce a transparent poem, but they also assumed that Horace would have agreed:

Now and then Professor Newman surprises us with a grateful [sic] flow of verse:—

“Me not the enduring Sparta
Nor fertile-soil’d Larissa’s plain
So to the heart has smitten
As Anio headlong tumbling,
Loud-brawling Albuneia’s grot,
Tiburnus’ groves and orchards
With restless rivulets streaming.”

There is something of the rush of cool waters here. But what would Horace say, if he could come to life, and find himself singing the two stanzas subjoined?—

“Well of Bandusia, as crystal bright,
Luscious wine to thee with flowers is due;
To-morrow shall a kid
Thine become, who with horny front

Budding new, designs amours and war.
Vainly: since this imp o’ the frisky herd
With life-blood’s scarlet gush
Soon shall curdle thy icy pool.”

This is hard to read, while the Latin is as pleasant to the ear as the fountain which it brings before us to the imagination.

(London Quarterly Review 1858:193)

The reviewers’ negative evaluations rested on a contradiction that revealed quite clearly the domestic cultural values they privileged. In calling for a rhymed version, they inscribed the unrhymed Latin text with the verse form that dominated current English poetry while insisting that rhyme made the translation closer to Horace. The reviewers were articulating a hegemonic position in English literary culture, definitely slanted toward an academic elite: Horace’s text can be “pleasant to the ear” only for readers of Latin. Yet this academic reading was also presented in national cultural terms, with the reviewers assimilating Horace to traditional English prosody: