The Translator’s Invisibility

The reviewer assumed both Newman’s historicist concept of the ballad and the Whig historiography on which it was based. But Newman’s populist reading of Homer was rejected in favor of Arnoldian nobility. This move made a liberal periodical like the British Quarterly Review no different from the Tory Dublin University Magazine, in which a review of two hexameter translations inspired by Arnold’s lectures singled out Newman’s version for special criticism: “his unrhymed ballad metre, his quaint flat diction, and his laughtermoving epithets” amounted to an “unlucky burlesque” (Dublin University Magazine 1862:644; Sullivan 1983b:119–123). Newman’s verse form was described as “the mongrel ballad measure {140} of modern Greece,” a particularly inappropriate choice for Homer’s pure nobility.

Arnold can be said to have won this debate, even if his recommendation of hexameters for Homeric translation took almost a century to gain widespread acceptance—in the “free six-beat line” of Richmond Lattimore’s immensely popular version (Lattimore 1951:55).[13] The fate of Newman’s project was marginalization in his own time and since, with critiques giving way to virtual oblivion. This can be seen, first, in the publishing histories of the controversial documents. Between 1861 and 1924 British and American publishers brought out seventeen single-volume editions of Arnold’s lectures; between 1905 and 1954 fourteen different editions of Arnold’s selected essays contained the lectures—not to mention their inclusion in several complete editions of Arnold’s writing. Newman’s Iliad was reprinted only once, in 1871, and thereafter known primarily through quotations in Arnold’s lectures. Newman’s reply too was printed only once in the nineteenth century. During the first half of the twentieth, it was reprinted frequently, but only in selections of Arnold’s essays, presented as a supporting document subordinated to Arnold’s more important lectures, a minor text included to provide cultural background for the major author (see, for example, Arnold 1914). In 1960, the editor of Arnold’s Complete Prose Works, R.H.Super, believed that Newman’s reply wasn’t worth reprinting: His essay has achieved undeserved immortality only by being printed in several modern editions of Arnold’s essays (e.g. Oxford Standard Authors and Everyman’s Library); readers who wish to see what provoked the best of Arnold’s Homeric lectures may find it in one of those volumes. (Arnold 1960:249) Super saw Arnold’s lectures as valuable in themselves, transcending the cultural moment that called them forth, independent of Newman’s translation, of the entire international controversy, unquestionably superior to the other positions in the debate. Arnold’s domesticating translation theory, as well as the academic cultural values that informed it, had by this point achieved canonical status in Anglo-American literary culture.

Arnold’s ascendancy over Newman has taken other forms since the 1860s. Arnold’s lectures coined a satiric neologism for Newman’s translation discourse—to “Newmanize”—and for the next twenty-five {141} years this word was part of the lexicon of critical terms in the literary periodicals. In 1886, for example, The Athenaeum ran a favorable review of Arthur Way’s translation of the Iliad, but the reviewer nonetheless complained that “Mr Way, in fact, is a little inclined to ‘Newmanize’” because he “sometimes falls” into a “mongrel vocabulary,” deviating from current English usage: “Pure English of the simple sort is amply sufficient for the translating of Homer” (Athenaeum 1886:482–483).

A foreignizing translation method similar to Newman’s was adopted by another socially engaged Victorian translator, William Morris. In this case, it was Morris’s socialist investment in medievalism that led him to cultivate an archaic lexicon drawn from various literary forms, elite and popular (cf. Chandler 1970:209–230). Morris’s experiments received much more appreciative reviews than Newman’s, but they were also attacked, and for some of the same reasons. In 1888, the Quarterly Review ran an adulatory assessment of Arnold’s writing that extended his critique of Homeric translations to Morris’s Odyssey (1887–8): “By this travesty of an archaic diction, Mr William Morris […] has overlaid Homer with all the grotesqueness, the conceits, the irrationality of the Middle Ages, as Mr Arnold justly says that Chapman overlaid him” (Quarterly Review 1888:407–408).