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.
Both passages rest on innuendo instead of explicit judgment, on doubtful hearsay instead of more reliable evidence (“rumorem,” “suspicion”). Yet the English text makes several additions that offer {33} more certainty about Caesar’s motives and actions and about Suetonius’s own estimation: the translation is not just slanted against Caesar, but homophobic. This first appears in an inconsistency in the diction: Graves’s use of “homosexual relationship” to render “prostratae regi pudicitiae” (“surrendered his modesty to the king”) is an anachronism, a late nineteenth-century scientific term that diagnoses same-sex sexual activity as pathological and is therefore inappropriate for an ancient culture in which sexual acts were not categorized according to the participants’ sex (OED; Wiseman 1985:10–14). Graves then leads the reader to believe that this relationship did in fact occur: not only does he increase the innuendo by using “suspicion gave place to scandal” to translate “rumorem auxit” (“the rumor spread”), but he inserts the loaded “ostensibly,” entirely absent from the Latin text. Graves’s version implicitly equates homosexuality with perversion, but since the relationship was with a foreign monarch, there are also political implications, the hint of a traitorous collusion which the ambitious Caesar is concealing and which he may later exploit in a bid for power: the passage immediately preceding this one has the dictator Sulla associating Caesar with his archenemy Marius. Because the passage is so charged with lurid accusations, even the conclusive force of that “however,” promising a rehabilitation of Caesar’s image, is finally subverted by the possible suggestion of another sexual relationship in “saving a fellow soldier’s life.”
Suetonius later touches on Caesar’s sexual reputation, and here too Graves’s version is marked by a homophobic bias:
Pudicitiae eius famam nihil quidem praeter Nicomedis contubernium laesit.
The only specific charge of unnatural practices ever brought against him was that he had been King Nicomedes’ catamite.
Where the Latin text makes rather general and noncommittal references to Caesar’s sexuality, Graves chooses English words that stigmatize same-sex sexual acts as perverse: a question raised about “pudicitiae eius famam” (“his sexual reputation”) becomes a “specific charge of unnatural practices,” while “contubernium” (“sharing the {34} same tent,” “companionship,” “intimacy”) makes Caesar a “catamite,” a term of abuse in the early modern period for boys who were the sexual objects of men (OED). As an archaism, “catamite” deviates from the modern English lexicon used throughout this and other Penguin Classics, a deviation that is symptomatic of the domesticating process in Graves’s version. His prose is so lucid and supple that such symptoms can well be overlooked, enabling the translation to fix an interpretation while presenting that interpretation as authoritative, issuing from an authorial position that transcends linguistic and cultural differences to address the English-language reader. Graves’s interpretation, however, assimilates an ancient Latin text to contemporary British values. He punctures the myth of Caesar by equating the Roman dictatorship with sexual perversion, and this reflects a postwar homophobia that linked homosexuality with a fear of totalitarian government, communism, and political subversion through espionage. “In the Cold War,” Alan Sinfield notes, “prosecutions for homosexual ‘offences’ rose five times over in the 15 years from 1939,” and “communist homosexual treachery was witchhunted close to the heart of the high-cultural establishment” (Sinfield 1989:66, 299). Graves’s fluently translated Suetonius participated in this domestic situation, not just by stigmatizing Caesar’s sexuality, but by presenting the stigma as a historical fact. In the preface, Graves remarked that Suetonius “seems trustworthy,” but he also suggested inadvertently that this Roman historian shared sexual and political values currently prevailing in Britain: “his only prejudice being in favour of firm mild rule, with a regard for the human decencies” (Graves 1957:7).
Foreignizing translations that are not transparent, that eschew fluency for a more heterogeneous mix of discourses, are equally partial in their interpretation of the foreign text, but they tend to flaunt their partiality instead of concealing it. Whereas Graves’s Suetonius focuses on the signified, creating an illusion of transparency in which linguistic and cultural differences are domesticated, Ezra Pound’s translations often focus on the signifier, creating an opacity that calls attention to itself and distinguishes the translation both from the foreign text and from prevailing values in the target-language culture.
In Pound’s work, foreignization sometimes takes the form of archaism. His version of “The Seafarer” (1912) departs from modern English by adhering closely to the Anglo-Saxon text, imitating its compound words, alliteration, and accentual meter, even resorting to calque renderings that echo Anglo-Saxon phonology: “bitre {35} breostceare” / “bitter breast-cares”; “merewerges” / “mere-weary”; “corna caldast” / “corn of the coldest”; “floodwegas” / “flood-ways”; “hægl scurum fleag” / “hail-scur flew”; “mæw singende fore medodrince” / “the mews’ singing all my mead-drink.” But Pound’s departures from modern English also include archaisms drawn from later periods of English literature.
The word “aye” (“always”) is a Middle English usage that later appeared in Scottish and northern dialects, while “burghers” first emerges in the Elizabethan period (OED). The words “’mid” (for “amid”) and “bide” are poeticisms used by such nineteenth-century writers as Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and Morris. Pound’s lexicon in fact favors archaisms that have become poeticaclass="underline" “brine,” “o’er,” “pinion,” “laud,” “ado.”
Such textual features indicate that a translation can be foreignizing only by putting to work cultural materials and agendas that are domestic, specific to the target language, but also, in this case, anachronistic, specific to later periods. “The Seafarer” is informed by Pound’s knowledge of English literature from its beginnings, but also by his modernist poetics, by his favoring, notably in The Cantos, an elliptical, fragmentary verse in which subjectivity is split and determinate, presented as a site of heterogeneous cultural discourses (Easthope 1983:chap. 9). The peculiarities of Pound’s translation—the gnarled syntax, the {36} reverberating alliteration, the densely allusive archaism—slow the movement of the monologue, resisting assimilation, however momentarily, to a coherent subject (whether “author” or “seafarer”) and foregrounding the various English dialects and literary discourses that get elided beneath the illusion of a speaking voice. This translation strategy is foreignizing in its resistance to values that prevail in contemporary Anglo-American culture—the canon of fluency in translation, the dominance of transparent discourse, the individualistic effect of authorial presence.