The Translator’s Invisibility

if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral expression; and should judge the style to be as inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music.

(ibid.:14)

Yet Newman nonetheless insisted that such Anglocentric judgments must be minimized or avoided altogether: “to expect refinement and universal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite anachronistic and unreasonable” (ibid.:73). In arguing for a historicist approach to translation, Newman demonstrated that scholarly English critics like Arnold violated their own principle of universal reason by using it to justify an abridgement of the Greek text:

Homer never sees things in the same proportions as we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his “impertinences,” in order to give his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call {137} the proper “balance,” is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque but illogical mind.

(ibid.:56)

As such statements suggest, the Whig historiography that informed Newman’s concept of classical culture inevitably privileged Victorian social elites as exemplars of the most advanced stage of human development. As a result, it implicitly drew an analogy among their inferiors—the “barbarian,” the “savage,” the colonized (“Gold Coast”), and the popular English audience—exposing a patronizing and potentially racist side to Newman’s translation populism (and edging his position closer to Arnold’s). Yet Newman’s Whig historiography also enabled him to refine his sense of literary history and develop a translation project that both preserved the cultural difference of the foreign text and acknowledged the diversity of English literary discourses: “Every sentence of Homer was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns’s poems” (Newman 1861:35–36). Newman’s skepticism toward dominant cultural values in English even made him criticize Arnold’s admitted “Bibliolatry,” his reliance on “the authority of the Bible” in developing a lexicon for Homeric translations (Arnold 1960:165–166). Newman didn’t want the Bible’s cultural authority to exclude other archaic literary discourses, which he considered equally “sacred”: “Words which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent words” (Newman 1861:89).

The publication of Arnold’s lectures made Homeric translation an important topic of debate in Anglo-American culture, provoking not only a reply from Newman and a coda from Arnold, but many reviews and articles in a wide range of British and American periodicals. The reception was mixed. Reviewers were especially divided on the question of whether the ballad or the hexameter was the acceptable verse form for Homeric translation.[12] Yet Arnold was definitely favored over Newman, no matter what ideological standpoint the periodical may have established in previous reviewing. The Edinburgh-based North British Review, although “consistently Whiggish in politics,” possessed a religious and moral conservatism that led to an evangelical approach in literary reviews—and an endorsement of Arnold’s call for an academy with {138} national cultural authority (North British Review 1862:348; Sullivan 1984:276). In an article that discussed recent Homeric translations and the Arnold/Newman controversy, the reviewer accepted Arnold’s diagnosis of English culture as well as his dismissal of Newman’s archaism: “at present we have nothing but eccentricity, and arbitrary likings and dislikings. Our literature shows no regard for dignity, no reverence for law. […] The present ballad-mania is among the results of this licentiousness” (North British Review 1862:348).