The Translator’s Invisibility

{135} Newman was stung by Arnold’s lectures, and by the end of the year he published a book-length reply that allowed him to develop more fully the translation rationale he sketched in his preface. At the outset he made quite clear that his “sole object is, to bring Homer before the unlearned public” (Newman 1861:6). Newman questioned the authority Arnold assigned to the academy in the formation of a national culture. He pointed out that England was multicultural, a site of different values, and although an academic himself he sided with the nonacademic:

Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their court.

(ibid.:2)

Because Newman translated for a different audience, he refused such scholarly verse forms as the hexameters Arnold proposed:

The unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! Yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them; how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator.

(ibid.:12–13)

Newman’s assessment of “popular taste” led him to write his translation in the ballad form, which he described in terms that obviously sought to challenge Arnold’s: “It is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. It is essentially the national ballad metre” (ibid.:22). Newman’s reply emphasized the peculiar ideological significance of his project. His aim to produce a translation that was at once populist and nationalist was realized in an archaic literary discourse that resisted any scholarly domestication of the foreign text, any assimilation of it to the regime of transparent discourse in English:

{136} Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy, of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various, shall all be rendered in one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approximate to polished prose.

(ibid.:88)

Newman’s reply showed that translation could permit other, popular literary discourses to emerge in English only if it was foreignizing, or, in the case of classical literature, historicizing, only if it abandoned fluency to signify “the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer” (Newman 1861:22). Because Newman’s historiography was essentially Whiggish, assuming a teleological model of human development, a liberal concept of progress, he felt that Homer “not only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being a poet of a barbarian age” (ibid.:48).[11] Newman admitted that it was difficult to avoid judging past foreign cultures according to the cultural values—both academic and bourgeois—that distinguished Victorian elites from their social inferiors in England and elsewhere. He believed that