The Translator’s Invisibility

Arnold’s notion of Homer’s “nobility” assimilated the Greek text to the scholarly while excluding the popular. He noted that for an American reader the ballad “has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle, and thus provoking ludicrous associations” (ibid.:132). And although Arnold recommended the hexameter as the most suitable verse form for Homeric translation, he was careful to add that he didn’t have in mind the hexameters in Longfellow’s “pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline,” but rather those of “the accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr Hawtrey,” who was not only “one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer,” but the author of the 1847 volume English Hexameter Translations (ibid.:149, 151). Any translation was likely to be offensive to Arnold, given his scholarly adulation of the Greek text. Newman’s mixture of homely colloquialism, archaism, and close rendering proved positively alienating:

The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr Newman gives thus:—

“Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was not needed.
Myself right surely know also, that ’t is my doom to perish,
From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but never
Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.”
He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses

Here Mr Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut, indeed, as he calls Balius Spotted, and Podarga Spry-foot; which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdlle. Rossignol, or MrBright {134} M.Clair. And several other expressions, too,—“yelling,” “held afront,” “single-hoofed,”—leave, to say the very least, much to be desired.

(ibid.:134)

It is in fact Arnold’s habit of saying “the very least” that is most symptomatic of the anti-democratic tendency in his critique. Arnold refused to define his concept of “nobleness,” the one Homeric quality that distinguished the academic reading and justified his call for a national academy: “I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual personality of the artist” (Arnold 1960:159). Like Alexander Tytler, Arnold valued a public sphere of cultural consensus that would underwrite the “correct” translation discourse for Homer, but any democratic tendency in this national agenda foundered on an individualist aesthetics that was fundamentally impressionistic: “the presence or absence of the grand style can only be spiritually discerned” (ibid.:136). Unlike Tytler, Arnold could not easily accept a humanist assumption of universal “reason and good sense” because the English reading audience had become too culturally and socially diverse; hence Arnold’s turn to an academic elite to enforce its cultural agenda on the nation. As Terry Eagleton puts it, “Arnold’s academy is not the public sphere, but a means of defense against the actual Victorian public” (Eagleton 1984:64; see also Baldick 1983:29–31).

The “grand style” was so important to Arnold because it was active in the construction of human subjects, capable of imprinting other social groups with academic cultural values: “it can form the character, it is edifying. […] the few artists in the grand style […] can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him” (Arnold 1960:138–139). Yet because Homeric nobleness depended on the individual personality of the writer or reader and could only be experienced, not described, it was autocratic and irrational. The individualism at the root of Arnold’s critique finally undermines the cultural authority he assigned to the academy by issuing into contradiction: he vaguely linked nobility to the individual personality, but he also faulted Newman’s translation precisely because of its individualism. For Arnold, Newman indulged “some individual fancy,” exemplifying a deplorable national trait, “the great defect of English intellect, the great blemish of English literature”—“eccentricity and arbitrariness” (ibid.:140).