Symptomatic reading can thus be useful in demystifying the illusion of transparency in a contemporary English-language translation. In some translations, the discontinuities are readily apparent, unintentionally disturbing the fluency of the language, revealing the inscription of the domestic culture; other translations bear prefaces that announce the translator’s strategy and alert the reader to the presence of noticeable stylistic peculiarities. A case in point is Robert Graves’s version of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars. Graves’s preface offered a frank account of his domesticating translation method:
For English readers Suetonius’s sentences, and sometimes even groups of sentences, must often be turned inside-out. Wherever his references are incomprehensible to anyone not closely familiar with the Roman scene, I have also brought up into the text a few words of explanation that would normally have appeared in a footnote. Dates have been everywhere changed from the pagan to the Christian era; modern names of cities used whenever they are more familiar to the common reader than the classical ones; and sums in sesterces reduced to gold pieces, at 100 to a gold piece (of twenty denarii), which resembled a British sovereign.
Graves’s vigorous revision of the foreign text aims to assimilate the source-language culture (Imperial Rome) to that of the target language (the United Kingdom in 1957). The work of assimilation depends not only on his extensive knowledge of Suetonius and Roman culture during the Empire (e.g. the monetary system), but also on his knowledge of contemporary British culture as manifested by English syntactical forms and what he takes to be the function of his {30} translation. His “version,” he wrote in the preface, was not intended to serve as a “school crib,” but to be readable: “a literal rendering would be almost unreadable” (ibid.:8) because it would adhere too closely to the Latin text, even to the Latin word order.
Graves sought to make his translation extremely fluent, and it is important to note that this was both a deliberate choice and culturally specific, determined by contemporary English-language values and not by any means absolute or originating with Graves in a fundamental way. On the contrary, the entire process of producing the translation, beginning with the very choice of the text and including both Graves’s textual moves and the decision to publish the translation in paperback, was conditioned by factors like the decline in the study of classical languages among educated readers, the absence of another translation on the market, and the remarkable popularity of the novels that Graves himself created from Roman historians like Suetonius—I, Claudius and Claudius the God, both continuously in print since 1934. Graves’s version of The Twelve Caesars appeared as one of the “Penguin Classics,” a mass-market imprint designed for both students and general readers.
As J.M. Cohen has observed, the translations in Penguin Classics were pioneering in their use of transparent discourse, “plain prose uniformity,” largely in response to cultural and social conditions:
The translator […] aims to make everything plain, though without the use of footnotes since the conditions of reading have radically changed and the young person of today is generally reading in far less comfortable surroundings than his father or grandfather. He has therefore to carry forward on an irresistible stream of narrative. Little can be demanded of him except his attention. Knowledge, standards of comparison, Classical background: all must be supplied by the translator in his choice of words or in the briefest of introductions.
Graves’s version of Suetonius reflects the cultural marginality of classical scholarship in the post-World War II period and the growth of a mass market for paperback literature, including the bestselling historical novels by which he made a living for many years. His translation was so effective in responding to this situation that it too became a bestseller, reprinted five times within a decade of publication. As Graves indicated in an essay on “Moral Principles in {31} Translation,” the “ordinary” reader of a classical text (Diodorus is his example) “wants mere factual information, laid out in good order for his hasty eye to catch” (Graves 1965:51). Although Apuleius “wrote a very ornate North African Latin,” Graves translated it “for the general public in the plainest possible prose.” Making the foreign text “plain” means that Graves’s translation method is radically domesticating: it requires not merely the insertion of explanatory phrases, but the inscription of the foreign text with values that are anachronistic and ethnocentric. In the preface to his Suetonius, Graves made clear that he deliberately modernized and Anglicized the Latin. At one point, he considered adding an introductory essay that would signal the cultural and historical difference of the text by describing key political conflicts in late Republican Rome. But he finally omitted it: “most readers,” he felt, “will perhaps prefer to plunge straight into the story and pick up the threads as they go along” (Graves 1957:8), allowing his fluent prose to turn transparent and so conceal the domesticating work of the translation.
This work can be glimpsed in discontinuities between Graves’s translation discourse and Suetonius’s particular method of historical and biographical narrative. Graves’s reading of Suetonius, as sketched in his preface, largely agreed with the contemporary academic reception of the Latin text. As the classicist Michael Grant has pointed out, Suetonius
gathers together, and lavishly inserts, information both for and against [the rulers of Rome], usually without adding any personal judgment in one direction or the other, and above all without introducing the moralizations which had so frequently characterized Greek and Roman biography and history alike. Occasionally conflicting statements are weighed. In general, however, the presentation is drily indiscriminate. […] the author’s own opinions are rarely permitted to intrude, and indeed he himself, in collecting all this weird, fascinating material, appears to make little effort to reach a decision about the personalities he is describing, or to build up their characteristics into a coherent account. Perhaps, he may feel, that is how people are: they possess discordant elements which do not add up to a harmonious unity.
{32} Grant’s account suggests that the Latin text does not offer a coherent position of subjectivity for the reader to occupy: we are unable to identify with either the author (“the author’s own opinions are rarely permitted to intrude”) or the characters (“the personalities” are not given “a coherent account”). As a result, Suetonius’s narrative may seem to possess a “relatively high degree of objectivity,” but it also contains passages that provoke considerable doubt, especially since “his curiously disjointed and staccato diction can lead to obscurity” (ibid.:7–8). Graves’s fluent translation smooths out these features of the Latin text, insuring intelligibility, constructing a more coherent position from which the Caesars can be judged, and making any judgment seem true, right, obvious.
Consider this passage from the life of Julius Caesar:
Stipendia prima in Asia fecit Marci Thermi praetoris contubernio; a quo ad accersendam classem in Bithyniam missus desedit apud Nicomeden, non sine rumorem prostratae regi pudicitiae; quern rumorem auxit intra paucos rursus dies repetita Bithynia per causam exigendae pecuniae, quae deberetur cuidam libertino clienti suo. reliqua militia secundiore fama fuit et a Thermo in expugnatione Mytilenarum corona civica donatus est.
Caesar first saw military service in Asia, where he went as aidedecamp to Marcus Thermus, the provincial governor. When Thermus sent Caesar to raise a fleet in Bithynia, he wasted so much time at King Nicomedes’ court that a homosexual relationship between them was suspected, and suspicion gave place to scandal when, soon after his return to headquarters, he revisited Bithynia: ostensibly collecting a debt incurred there by one of his freedmen. However, Caesar’s reputation improved later in the campaign, when Thermus awarded him the civic crown of oak leaves, at the storming of Mytilene, for saving a fellow soldier’s life.