The Translator’s Invisibility

In the same year, Longman’s Magazine, a monthly devoted to bringing “literature of a high standard” to a mass audience, ran an article in which Morris’s translations were cited as prime examples of “Wardour-Street Early English—a perfectly modern article with a sham appearance of the real antique about it” (Ballantyne 1888:589; Sullivan 1984:209–213). This reference to the shops in Wardour Street that sold antique furniture, both authentic and imitation, questioned the authenticity of Morris’s archaism while linking it to nonstandard English dialects and marginal literary forms. The reviewer’s elitism was recognizably Arnoldian:

Poems in which guests go bedward to beds that are arrayed right meet, poems in which thrall-folk seek to the feast-hall a-winter, do not belong to any literary centre. They are provincial; they are utterly without distinction; they are unspeakably absurd.

(Ballantyne 1888:593)

The “literary centre” was fluent translation. In 1889, the Quarterly Review likewise attacked Morris’s Aeneid (1875) because of “the sense of {142} incongruity inspired by such Wardour-Street English as eyen and clepe” (Faulkner 1973:28, n. 81). Here the “centre” is also identified as standard English, the language of contemporary political insitutions, leading politicians. The Longman’s article on “Wardour-Street English” observed that

if the Lord Chancellor or Mr Speaker were to deliver one of these solemn pronouncements in any cockney or county dialect, he would leave upon his hearers the same sense of the grotesque and the undignified which a reader carries away from an author who, instead of using his own language in its richest and truest literary form, takes up a linguistic fad, and, in pursuit of it, makes his work provincial instead of literary.

(Ballantyne 1888:593–594)

Morris’s translations did no more than “pretend to be literature,” because literary texts were written in a dialect of English that was educated and official and thus excluded popular linguistic and literary forms.

“Wardour-Street English” eventually came to be used as a term of abuse for archaic diction in any kind of writing—applied to widely read historical novels, particularly imitations of Scott, but also to nonfiction prose, including an eccentric volume like The Gate of Remembrance (1918). Produced by the director of the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey, F.Bligh Bond, this was an attempt to enlist “psychical research” in the “work of architectural exploration” (Spectator 1918:422). Bligh’s volume presented the “automatic writing” of one “J.A.,” in which the historical associations of the abbey were personified and given voice in various languages: Latin (“William the Monk”), Anglo-Saxon (“Awfwold ye Saxon”), and a mixture of Middle and Early Modern English (“Johannes, Lapidator or Stone-Mason,” “defunctus anno 1533”). The reviewer for the Spectator judged this linguistic experiment favorably, but got more pleasure from the Latin, which, he felt, “is much to be preferred to the Wardour Street English” assigned to the stonemason (ibid.:422). Interestingly, the passage of automatic writing quoted by the reviewer links English archaism once again to the unlearned, the subordinate: it shows the stonemason resisting the use of Latin architectural terms imposed on him by monkish treatises: Ye names of builded things are very hard in Latin tongue— transome, fanne tracery, and the like. My son, thou canst not {143} understande. Wee wold speak in the Englyshe tongue. Ye saide that ye volte was multipartite yt was fannes olde style in ye este ende of ye choire and ye newe volt in Edgares chappel…. Glosterfannes (repeated). Fannes…(again) yclept fanne… Johannes lap…mason. (ibid.:422) To the reviewer, such language was “thoroughly bad,” and it marred even a “very curious and attractive passage” about “the tomb of Arthur” by suggesting popular literary forms: “there are obvious reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott and Ivanhoe in this piece of most unblushing but rather vivid Wardour Street” (ibid.).