It only remains to speak of the Versification. Homer (as has been said) is perpetually applying the Sound to the Sense, and varying it on every new Subject. This is indeed one of the most exquisite Beauties of Poetry, and attainable by very few: I know only of Homer eminent for it in the Greek, and Virgil in Latine. I am sensible it is what may sometimes happen by Chance, when a Writer is warm, and fully possest of his Image: however it may be reasonably believed they designed this, in whose Verse it so manifestly appears in a superior degree to all others. Few Readers have the Ear to be Judges of it, but those who have will see I have endeavoured at this Beauty.
Pope manifests the distinctive blind spot of domesticating translation, confusing, under the illusion of transparency, the interpretation/translation with the foreign text, even with the foreign writer’s intention, canonizing classical writing on the basis of Enlightenment concepts of poetic discourse, a metrical facility designed to reduce the signifier to a coherent signified, “perpetually applying the Sound to the Sense.” The fluency of Pope’s Homer set the standard for verse translations of classical poetry, so that, as Penelope Wilson notes,
we find the ancient poets emerging from the mill of decorum in more or less undifferentiated batches of smooth rhyme, or blank verse, and elegant diction. They are generally met by reviewers with correspondingly vague commendations such as ‘not less faithful than elegant’; and when they are condemned, they are more often condemned on stylistic grounds than on those of accuracy.
In the eighteenth century, stylistic elegance in a translation can already be seen as symptomatic of domestication, bringing the {67} ancient text in line with literary standards prevailing in Hanoverian Britain.
During this crucial moment in its cultural rise, domesticating translation was sometimes taken to extremes that look at once oddly comical and rather familiar in their logic, practices a translator might use today in the continuing dominion of fluency. William Guthrie, for instance, in the preface to his version of The Orations of Marcus Tallius Cicero (1741), argued that “it is living Manners alone that can communicate the Spirit of an Original” and so it is sufficient if the translator has made
it his Business to be as conversant as he cou’d in that Study and Manner which comes the nearest to what we may suppose his Author, were he now to live, wou’d pursue, and in which he wou’d shine.
This was Guthrie’s reason for casting his Cicero as a member of Parliament, “where,” he says, “by a constant Attendance, in which I was indulg’d for several Years, I endeavour’d to possess my self of the Language most proper for this translation” (ibid.:99). Guthrie’s translation naturalized the Latin text with the transparent discourse he developed as a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine.
It is important not to view such instances of domestication as simply inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy and fidelity are always locally defined, specific to different cultural formations at different historical moments. Both Denham and Dryden recognized that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs in the translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal relationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, always somewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and a supplement. Yet they also viewed their domesticating method as the most effective way to control this equivocal relationship and produce versions adequate to the Latin text. As a result, they castigated methods that either rigorously adhered to source-language textual features or played fast and loose with them in ways that they were unwilling to license, that insufficiently adhered to the canon of fluency in translation. Dryden “thought it fit to steer betwixt the two Extreams, of Paraphrase, and literal Translation” (Dryden 1958:1055), i.e., between the aim of {68} reproducing primarily the meanings of the Latin text, usually at the cost of its phonological and syntactical features, and the aim of rendering it word for word, respecting syntax and line break. And he distinguished his method from Abraham Cowley’s “imitations” of Pindar, partial translations that revised and, in effect, abandoned the foreign text. Dryden felt it was Denham “who advis’d more Liberty than he took himself” (Dryden 1956:117), permitting Denham’s substantial liberties—the editing of the Latin text, the domestic lexicon—to pass unnoticed, refined out of existence, naturalized by the majesty of the style. The ethnocentric violence performed by domesticating translation rested on a double fidelity, to the source-language text as well as to the target-language culture, and especially to its valorization of transparent discourse. But this was clearly impossible and knowingly duplicitous, accompanied by the rationale that a gain in domestic intelligibility and cultural force outweighed the loss suffered by the foreign text and culture.
This trend in English-language translation gets pushed to a new extreme at the end of the eighteenth century, in Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791). Tytler’s influential treatise is a key document in the canonization of fluency, a digest of its “principles,” “laws,” and “precepts” which offers a plethora of illustrative examples. His decisive consolidation of earlier statements, French as well as English, constituted a theoretical refinement, visible in the precision of his distinctions and in the philosophical sophistication of his assumptions: domestication is now recommended on the basis of a general human nature that is repeatedly contradicted by an aesthetic individualism.
For Tytler, the aim of translation is the production of an equivalent effect that transcends linguistic and cultural differences:
I would therefore describe a good translation to be, That, in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.
The “merit” of the foreign text, and the “excellencies and defects” of attempts to reproduce it in translation, are accessible to all, because, in so far as reason and good sense afford a criterion, the opinion of all {69} intelligent readers will probably be uniform. But, as it is not to be denied, that in many of the examples adduced in this Essay, the appeal lies not so much to any settled canons of criticism, as to individual taste; it will not be surprising, if in such instances, a diversity of opinion should take place: and the Author having exercised with great freedom his own judgment in such points, it would ill become him to blame others for using the same freedom in dissenting from his opinions. The chief benefit to be derived from all such discussions in matters of taste, does not so much arise from any certainty we can obtain of the rectitude of our critical decisions, as from the pleasing and useful exercise which they give to the finest powers of the mind, and those which most distinguish us from the inferior animals. (ibid.:vii–viii) For Tytler, it is possible both to translate successfully and to evaluate translations because he assumes that linguistic and cultural differences do not exist at a fundamental level, invoking a universal “reason and good sense” that distinguishes a public sphere of cultural consensus (“readers”) but extends to the species, “intelligent” human beings.[10] Yet he subsequently narrows this sphere, first excluding consensus (“settled canons of criticism”) and then appealing to the “freedom” of “individual taste.” Tytler’s “common sense” approach to translation rests on a liberal humanism that is stated with a fugitive democratic gesture (a public sphere of cultural debate), but lapses ultimately into an individualist aesthetics with skeptical consequences: “in matters where the ultimate appeal is to Taste, it is almost impossible to be secure of the solidity of our opinions, when the criterion of their truth is so very uncertain” (ibid.:11).
[10]
For the emergence and function of the “public sphere” in the eighteenth century, see Habermas 1989, Hohendahl 1982, and Eagleton 1984.