The Translator’s Invisibility

{127} To discard the old machinery of recurrent rhymes, which has grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of our poetical language, to set aside the thousand familiar and expected effects of beat, and pause, and repetition, and of the modulation of measuresound that makes the everchanging charm of lyrical verse—to set aside all this for the disappointing, unfamiliar machinery of verses, each with a different ending, unrelieved by any new grace of expression, any new harmony of sound, is simply the work of a visionary, working not for the enjoyment of his readers, but the gratification of a crotchety and perverted taste.

(London Quarterly Review 1874:15)

This call for a domesticated Horace was motivated by a nationalist investment in “the strength of our poetical language.” Newman’s version was “perverted” because it was un-English: “to have to break up all our English traditions for something utterly novel and yet mediocre, is a severe demand to make from the great public which reads for pleasure” (London Quarterly Review 1858:193). Newman tested the reviewers’ assumption that the English reading audience wanted every foreign text to be rewritten according to dominant literary values. Yet the very heterogeneity of his translations, their borrowings from various literary discourses, gave the lie to this assumption by pointing to the equally heterogeneous nature of the audience. Newman’s foreignized texts were challenging an elitist concept of a national English culture.

The cultural force of his challenge can be gauged from the reception of his Iliad. Newman’s foreignizing strategy led him to choose the ballad as the archaic English form most suitable to Homeric verse. And this choice embroiled him in a midcentury controversy over the prosody of Homeric translations, played out both in numerous reviews and essays and in a spate of English versions with the most different verse forms: rhymed and unrhymed, ballad meter and Spenserian stanza, hendecasyllabics and hexameters. Here too the stakes were at once cultural—competing readings of the Greek texts—and political— competing concepts of the English nation.

Newman used ballad meter for his Iliad because he sought “a poetry which aims to be antiquated and popular” (Newman 1856:xii). “The style of Homer,” he argued, “is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous, abounding with formulas, redundant in particles and affirmatory interjections, as also in grammatical connectives of time, place, and argument” (ibid.:iv). He defined the “popular” aspect {128} of the Greek text historically, as the product of an oral archaic culture at a rudimentary level of literary development, “a stage of the national mind in which divisions of literature were not recognized [,] even the distinction of prose and poetry” (ibid.:iv). But he also located contemporary “popular” analogues, English as well as Greek. In choosing the ballad, Newman recalled, “I found with pleasure that I had exactly alighted on the metre which the modern Greeks adopt for the Homeric hexameter” in what he called “the modern Greek epic” (ibid.:vii–viii). The texts in question were actually ballads sung by nineteenth-century mountain brigands in the Peloponnese, “Klephts,” who fought in the Greek resistance against the Turkish Empire.[10]

The English analogues Newman cited were equally “modern”—contemporary versions of archaic forms. He argued that “our real old ballad-writers are too poor and mean to repesent Homer, and are too remote in diction from our times to be popularly intelligible” (Newman 1856:x). To secure this “popular” intelligibility, his translation reflected the archaism in the English historical novel and narrative poem: he thought Scott would have been an ideal translator of Homer. Yet Newman’s discourse was also explicitly oral, unlearned, and English, his syntactical inversions approximated current English speech: