The Translator’s Invisibility

in all lively conversation we use far more inversion than in the style of essay-writing; putting the accusative before the verb, beginning a sentence with a predicate or with a negative, and in other ways approaching to the old style, which is truly native to every genuine Englishman.

(ibid.:xi)

This was a concept of “the old style” that was nationalist as well as populist. Newman’s “Saxo-Norman” lexicon “owe[d] as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning” (ibid.:vi). And the “several old-fashioned formulas” he used opposed academic prescriptions for English usage:

In modern style, our classical scholars at an early period introduced from Latin a principle which seems to me essentially unpopular, viz., to end a clause with than he, than thou, than she, &c., where they think a nominative is needed. […] I cannot listen to unsophisticated English talk, without being convinced that in old English the words me, thee, him, &c., are not merely accusatives, but are also the isolated {129} form of the pronoun, like moi, toi, lui. In reply to the question, “Who is there?” every English boy or girl answers Me, until he or she is scolded into saying I. In modern prose the Latinists have prevailed; but in a poetry which aims to be antiquated and popular, I must rebel.

(ibid.:xi–xii)

The “popular” in Newman’s translation was a contemporary construction of an archaic form that carried various ideological implications. It drew on an analogous Greek form affiliated with a nationalist movement to win political autonomy from foreign domination (or, more precisely, a criminal fringe of this movement, the Klepht resistance). And it assumed an English culture that was national yet characterized by social divisions, in which cultural values were ranged hierarchically among various groups, academic and nonacademic. Newman’s archaism constituted the democratic tendency in his concept of the English nation because it was populist, assigning popular cultural forms a priority over the academic elite that sought to suppress them. He thought of the ballad as “our Common Metre” (Newman 1856:vii).

Newman’s Iliad received little attention in the periodicals—until, several years later, Matthew Arnold decided to attack it in a lecture series published as On Translating Homer (1861). Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, described the lectures as an effort “to lay down the true principles on which a translation of Homer should be founded,” and these were principles diametrically opposed to Newman’s (Arnold 1960:238). Arnold wanted translation to transcend, rather than signify, linguistic and cultural differences, and so he prized the illusionism of transparent discourse, using the “strange language” of mystical transcendence to describe the process of domestication:

Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place

Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,
Defecates to a pure transparency;

and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling on the {130} translator’s part—“defecates to a pure transparency,” and disappears.

(ibid.:103)