The Translator’s Invisibility

In this remarkable analogy, Arnold’s translation “principles” assumed a Christian Platonic metaphysics of true semantic equivalence, whereby he demonized (or fecalized) the material conditions of translation, the target-language values that define the translator’s work and inevitably mark the source-language text. Current English “modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling” must be repressed, like a bodily function; they are “alien” excrement soiling the classical text. This is an antiquarianism that canonized the Greek past while approaching the English present with a physical squeamishness. Arnold didn’t demonize all domestic values, however, since he was in fact upholding the canonical tradition of English literary translation: following Denham, Dryden, Tytler, Frere, he recommended a free, domesticating method to produce fluent, familiar verse that respected bourgeois moral values. The difference between the foreign text and English culture “disappears” in this tradition because the translator removes it—while invisibly inscribing a reading that reflects English literary canons, a specific interpretation of “Homer.” In Arnold’s case,

So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect.

(Arnold 1960:157–158)

For Arnold, what determined familiarity of effect was not merely transparent discourse, fluency as opposed to “literalness,” but the prevailing academic reading of Homer, validated by scholars at Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford. Indeed, Arnold’s main contention—and the point on which he differed most from Newman—was that only readers of the Greek text were qualified to evaluate English versions of it: “a competent scholar’s judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original” (Arnold 1960:201). Throughout the lectures Arnold repeatedly set forth this “effect” in authoritative statements: “Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is {131} noble in manner” (ibid.:141). Using this explicitly academic reading, Arnold argued that various translators, past and present, “have failed in rendering him”: George Chapman, because of “the fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain directness of Homer’s thought and feeling”; Pope, because of his “literary artificial manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer”; William Cowper, because of his “elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer”; and, finally, Newman, whose “manner” was “eminently ignoble, while Homer’s manner is eminently noble” (ibid.:103). Here it becomes clear that Newman’s translation was foreignizing because his archaism deviated from the academic reading of Homer:

Why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They are faulty, first, because, as a matter of diction, the expressions “O gentle friend,” “eld,” “in sooth,” “liefly,” “advance,” “man-ennobling,” “sith,” “any-gait,” and “sly of foot,” are all bad; some of them worse than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions profess to render.

(ibid.:133)

Arnold’s critique of Newman’s translation was informed by a concept of English culture that was nationalist as well as elitist. To demonstrate the effect of familiarity that a scholar experiences before the Greek text, Arnold gave examples of English “expressions” that he called “simple,” transparently intelligible, but that also constituted Anglocentric stereotypes of foreign cultures, implicitly racist: