Campbell’s condemnation of close translation is a sharp reminder that any advocacy of transparent discourse conceals an investment in domestic cultural values—in his case, a Christian dogmatism with anti-Semitic overtones:
A slavish attachment to the letter, in translating, is originally the offspring of the superstition, not of the Church, but of the synagogue, where it would have been more suitable in Christian interpreters, the ministers, not of the letter, but of the spirit, to have allowed it to remain.
Like Tytler, however, Campbell also assumed the existence of a public sphere governed by universal reason. In an exchange of letters, Campbell took the self-congratulary view that the similarity of their ideas constituted “evidence” for “a concurrence in sentiment upon critical subjects with persons of distinguished ingenuity and erudition” (Alison 1818:27). Yet the elite and exclusionary nature of this cultural consensus becomes evident, not merely in Campbell’s Christian dogmatism, but also in his initial reaction to Tytler’s treatise: Campbell wrote to the publisher to learn the author’s name because, although he was “flattered not a little to think, that he had in these points the concurrence in judgment of a writer so ingenious,” he nonetheless voiced “his suspicion, that the author might have borrowed from his Dissertation, without acknowledging the obligation” (Alison 1818:27; Tytler 1978:xxxii). Campbell too was a translator with a sense of authorship—at once Christian and individualistic—that could be ruffled by other translations and translation discourses, provoking him to reactions that ran counter to his humanist assumptions.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, a translation method of eliding the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text was firmly entrenched as a canon in English-language translation, always linked to a valorization of transparent discourse. The canonicity of domesticating translation was so far beyond question that it survived the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere, “now much less one of bland consensus than of ferocious contention,” in which English literary periodicals constituted cultural factions with explicit political {77} positions (Eagleton 1984:37). In 1820, John Hookham Frere, who would later publish his own translations of Aristophanes, unfavorably reviewed Thomas Mitchell’s versions of The Acharnians and The Knights in the staunchly conservative Quarterly Review, Tory defender of neoclassical literary theory and the traditional authority of aristocracy and the Anglican Church (Sullivan 1983b:359–367). For Frere, the principal “defect” of Mitchell’s translation was that it cultivated an archaic dramatic discourse, “the style of our ancient comedy in the beginning of the 16th century,” whereas the language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more; it ought never to attract attention to itself; hence all phrases that are remarkable in themselves, either as old or new; all importations from foreign languages and quotations, are as far as possible to be avoided. […] such phrases as [Mitchell] has sometimes admitted, ‘solus cum solo,’ for instance, ‘petits pates,’ &c. have the immediate effect of reminding the reader, that he is reading a translation, and […] the illusion of originality, which the spirited or natural turn of a sentence immediately preceding might have excited, is instantly dissipated by it. (Frere 1820:481) Frere advocated the now familiar fluent strategy, in which the language of the translation is made to read with a “spirited or natural turn,” so that the absence of any syntactical and lexical peculiarities produces the “illusion” that the translation is not a translation, but the foreign text, reflecting the foreign writer’s intention: “It is the office, we presume, of the Translator to represent the forms of language according to the intention with which they are employed” (ibid.:482). The reviewer for the Edinburgh Review, a magazine whose liberal, Whiggish politics called the Quarterly Review into existence, nonetheless agreed that Mitchell’s Aristophanes was defective, and for the same reason: he “devoted too much time to working in the mines of our early dramatists, instead of undergoing the greater trouble it would have cost him to form a style of his own more suited to the exigency” (Edinburgh Review 1820:306).[12] The reviewer defined this “exigency” in terms of the stylistic feature repeatedly attributed to classical texts throughout the eighteenth century, asserting that “simplicity should never be forgotten in a translation of Aristophanes” {78} (ibid.:307). Yet the reviewer also suggested that the simplicity should be considered a feature of Mitchell’s style as well (“a style of his own”), showing unwittingly that fluent translation domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible in an English-language culture that values easy readability, transparent discourse, the illusion of authorial presence.
Once again, the domestication enacted by a fluent strategy was not seen as producing an inaccurate translation. The usually contentious periodicals agreed that William Stewart Rose’s 1823 version of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was both fluent and faithful. Blackwood’s, a magazine that pursued Tory conservatism to reactionary extremes, called Rose’s translation “a work which, of necessity, addresses itself to the more refined classes,” since “never was such scrupulous fidelity of rendering associated with such light dancing elegance of language” (Blackwood’s 1823:30).[13] The London Magazine, which sought to maintain an independent neutrality amid its politically factious competitors, similarly found that Rose “generally combined the garrulous ease and unpremeditated manner of the original with a terse and equable flow of numbers” (London Magazine 1824:626; Sullivan 1983b:288–296). The Quarterly Review took Rose’s version as an opportunity to restate the canons of fluent translation:
the two characteristics of a good translation are, that it should be faithful, and that it should be unconstrained. Faithful, as well in rendering correctly the meaning of the original, as in exhibiting the general spirit which pervades it: unconstrained, so as not to betray by its phraseology, by the collocation of its words, or construction of its sentences that it is only a copy.
A fluent strategy can be associated with fidelity because the effect of transparency conceals the translator’s interpretation of the foreign text, the semantic context he has constructed in the translation according to target-language cultural values. Rose’s fluent translation was praised for “rendering correctly the meaning of the original” because it assimilated the Italian text to English values, not only the valorization of “unconstrained” language, but also the interpretation of Ariosto’s poem that currently prevailed in the target culture. And, once again, the dominion of fluency entailed that canonical texts, the ancient and modern texts in which the sense of original authorship was felt to be most pronounced, would {79} possess stylistic simplicity. The reviewer for the London Magazine declared that Orlando Furioso is characterized by “this exquisite simplicity, which bears the distinctive mark of a superior genius” (London Magazine 1824:626).
[12]
For the ideological standpoint of the
[13]
Blackwood’s also ran a favorable review of the second volume of Rose’s Ariosto (Blackwood’s 1824). For the ideological standpoint of this magazine, see Hayden 1969:62–63, 73 and Sullivan 1983b:45–53.