The Translator’s Invisibility

[Greek] expressions seem no more odd to [the scholar] than the simplest expressions in English. He is not more checked by any feeling of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than when he reads in an English book “the painted savage,” or, “the phlegmatic Dutchman.”

(ibid.:123)

In Arnold’s view, Newman’s translation demonstrated the need for an academic elite to establish national cultural values:

{132} I think that in England, partly from the want of an Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected by it.

(ibid.:171–172)

The social function Arnold assigned translators like Newman was to “correct” English cultural values by bringing them in line with scholarly “opinion.” Translation for Arnold was a means to empower an academic elite, to endow it with national cultural authority, but this empowerment involved an imposition of scholarly values on other cultural constituencies—including the diverse English-reading audience that Newman hoped to reach. The elitism in Arnold’s concept of a national English culture assumed an unbridgeable social division: “These two impressions—that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader—can, practically, never be accurately compared” (ibid.:201). Translation bridges this division, but only by eliminating the nonscholarly.

Arnold’s attack on Newman’s translation was an academic repression of popular cultural forms that was grounded in a competing reading of Homer. Where Arnold’s Homer was elitist, possessing “nobility,” “a great master” of “the grand style,” New-man’s was populist and, to Arnold, “ignoble.” Hence, Arnold insisted that

the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and powerful: the ballad-manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful.

(Arnold 1960:128)

Arnold rejected the use of the “ballad-manner” in various English translations—Chapman’s Homer, Dr William Maginn’s Homeric Ballads and Comedies of Lucian (1850), Newman’s Iliad—because he found it “over-familiar,” “commonplace,” “pitched sensibly lower than Homer’s” verse (ibid.:117, 124, 155). Newman’s archaism in {133} particular degraded the canonical Greek text by resorting to colloquial Shakespearean expressions, like “To grunt and sweat under a weary load”—a judgment that again revealed the strain of bourgeois squeamishness in Arnold’s academic elitism:

if the translator of Homer […] were to employ, when he has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of “grunting” and “sweating,” we should say, He Newmanises, and his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this.

(ibid.:155)