The Translator’s Invisibility

The stigma attached to archaism involved an exclusion of the popular that is also evident in prescriptive stylistic manuals, like H.W.Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). Fowler included an entry on archaism that treated it as dangerous except in the hands of an experienced writer who can trust his sense of congruity. Even when used to give colour to conversation in historical romances, what Stevenson called tushery is more likely to irritate the reader than to please him. (Fowler 1965:34) Fowler’s “experienced writer” was apparently not the author of popular historical romances. And the reader he had in mind obviously preferred transparent discourse.

In the academy, where Arnold the apologist for an academic elite was ensconced as a canonical writer, the historicizing translations of Newman and Morris have repeatedly been subjected to Arnoldian thrashings. T.S.Osmond’s 1912 study of the Arnold/Newman controversy agreed with Arnold’s “protests against the use of ridiculous or too uncommon words” in translations because they preempt the illusion of transparency: “One’s attention is held by the words, instead of by the thing that is being told” (Osmond 1912:82). In 1956, Basil Willey’s attempt to rehabilitate Newman’s reputation focused mainly on his religious treatises, particularly The Soul (1849), which Willey felt should be admitted to the Victorian canon, assigned “a much higher rank in devotional literature” (Willey 1956:45). Yet although Willey gave a generally balanced account of the translation controversy, he finally agreed with Arnold that Newman lacked the “individual personality” to render Homer’s “grand style”: “Newman, with all his great merits, was not a poet” {144} because “his spirit was not sufficiently ‘free, flexible and elastic’” (ibid.; see also Annan 1944:191).

In 1962, J.M.Cohen, the translator of canonical writers like Rabelais and Cervantes, published a history of English-language translation in which he approvingly described the dominant domesticating method and the “complete reversal of taste” that made Victorian archaism “unreadable” (although, as we have seen, it was definitely unreadable to many Victorians as well): “In contrast to the Victorians and Edwardians […] craftsmen in the last twenty years have aimed principally at interpretation in current language” (Cohen 1962:65). Cohen himself followed this dominant tendency toward transparent discourse, asserting that “the theory of Victorian translation appears from our point of view to have been founded on a fundamental error” and faulting Morris in particular for the density of his archaism: “Even the meaning has become obscure” (ibid.:24, 25). Cohen agreed with Arnold in attributing what he considered the defects of Victorian translation to its historicism. The experiments developed by translators like Newman, Morris, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Fitzgerald were misguided, Cohen felt, because the translators had “adapted their authors’ styles to their more or less erroneous pictures of the age in which these authors lived and worked” (ibid.:29). Yet Cohen was himself making the anachronistic assumption that the correct historical “pictures” were in “current language,” respectful of the modern canon of “plain prose uniformity” in translation (ibid.:33).

Finally, there is perhaps no clearer sign of Arnold’s continuing power in Anglo-American literary culture than Robert Fagles’ 1990 version of the Iliad, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Award for poetry translation from the Academy of American Poets. Fagles’ preface begins by acknowledging the oral quality of Homeric verse, but then reverts to Arnold’s reading of Homer:

Homer’s work is a performance, even in part a musical event. Perhaps that is the source of his speed, directness and simplicity that Matthew Arnold heard—and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold chased but never really caught.

(Fagles 1990:ix)

A classics translator who edited Pope’s Homer and is currently professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, Fagles demonstrates {145} not just that Arnold’s reading still prevails today, but that it continues to be affiliated with the academy and with the dominant tradition of English-language translation, fluent domestication. Fagles aimed for a version that was “literate” in an academic (i.e., Arnoldian) sense, negotiating between the “literal” and the “literary” in a way that implemented Dryden’s notion of “paraphrase,” producing in the end a modernized Homer: