The Translator’s Invisibility

Not a line-for-line translation, my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer’s language as to cramp and distort my own—though I want to convey as much of what he says as possible—nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drive—though I want my work to be literate, with any luck. For the more literal approach seems too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.

(ibid.:x)

Fagles also follows—even if in a flexible way—Arnold’s recommendation of hexameters for Homeric translation: “Working from a loose five- or six-beat line but inclining more to six, I expand at times to seven beats […] or contract at times to three” (ibid.:xi).

III

The Victorian controversy offers several lessons that can be brought to bear on contemporary English-language translation. Perhaps most importantly, the controversy shows that domesticating translation can be resisted without necessarily privileging a cultural elite. Newman advocated Schleiermacher’s foreignizing method, but he detached it from the cultural and political interests of a German literary coterie, at once elitist and nationalist. Newman instead assumed a more democratic concept of an English national culture, acknowledging its diversity and refusing to allow a cultural minority like the academy to dominate the nation. Newman was a scholar who truly believed that an English translator could address diverse cultural constituencies, satisfying scholarly canons of translation equivalence while appealing to popular taste: “While I profess to write for the unlearned English reader, yet I must necessarily be judged by classical scholars on the question of fidelity and correctness” (Newman 1853:vi).

{146} Yet the “foreign” in Newman’s foreignizing translations was defined precisely by his resistance to academic literary values, by his aim to encompass rather than exclude popular forms affiliated with various social groups. Foreignizing translation is based on the assumption that literacy is not universal, that communication is complicated by cultural differences between and within linguistic communities. But foreignizing is also an attempt to recognize and allow those differences to shape cultural discourses in the target language. Arnold’s advocacy of domesticating translation also did not assume a homogeneous national culture—indeed, for him the diversity of English literature meant chaos. Arnold’s response to cultural differences was to repress them, hewing to the dominant tradition in English-language translation and empowering an academic elite to maintain it. Newman demonstrated, however, that foreignizing translation can be a form of resistance in a democratic cultural politics.

The Victorian controversy also offers a practical lesson for contemporary English-language translators. It shows that close translation, what Arnold called Newman’s “literalness,” does not necessarily lead to unidiomatic, unintelligible English. Schleiermacher suggested that “the more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original, the more foreign it will seem to the reader” (Lefevere 1977:78), and Newman likewise argued that “in many passages it is of much value to render the original line by line” (Newman 1856:viii–ix), incurring Arnold’s satire for verbatim renderings of Homeric epithets—“ashen-speared,” “brazen-cloaked” (Arnold 1960:165). But Newman’s close adherence to the lineation and word-order of the Greek text was matched by an equally close attention to a distinctly English lexicon, syntax, and range of literary forms. Close translation certainly risks obscure diction, awkward constructions, and hybrid forms, but these vary in degree from one foreign text to another and from one domestic situation to another. Detections of “translationese” assume an investment in specific linguistic and cultural values to the exclusion of others. Hence, close translation is foreignizing only because its approximation of the foreign text entails deviating from dominant domestic values—like transparent discourse.