The strain of individualism in Tytler’s treatise is so powerful, however “uncertain” the contours of subjectivity may seem, that he never shows the slightest skepticism about aesthetic judgment and in fact constructs a concept of “correct taste” based on “exquisite feeling.” The translator’s every choice should be governed by it— even to the point of violating the “laws” for good translation. These include, first, “That the Translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work,” and, second, “That the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original” (Tytler 1978:16). The “man of exquisite feeling,” however, is invested with the “liberty” of “adding to or retrenching {70} the ideas of the original,” as well as the “privilege” of “correcting what appears to him a careless or inaccurate expression of the original, where that inaccuracy seems materially to affect the sense” (ibid.:54). Of course, what is “correct” is always a domestic value, including the discursive effect that dominates English culture at that moment, transparency. Hence, Tytler’s third and final “law” is “That the Translation should have all the ease of original composition” (ibid.:15).
Good translators implement fluent strategies: they avoid syntactical fragmentation, polysemy (“which, by the bye, is always a defect in composition” (Tytler 1978:28)), sudden shifts in discursive registers. Tytler praises Henry Steuart, “Esq.,” “the ingenious translator of Sallust,” for his “version of a most difficult author, into easy, pure, correct, and often most eloquent language”; Steuart recognized “the fruitlessness of any attempt to imitate the abrupt and sententious manner” of the Latin text (ibid.:188–189). Of Arthur Murphy’s Tacitus, Tytler remarks, “We most admire the judgment of the translator in forbearing all attempt to rival the brevity of the original, since he knew it could not be attained but with the sacrifice both of ease and perspicuity” (ibid.:186–187). “To imitate the obscurity or ambiguity of the original, is a fault; and it is still a greater, to give more than one meaning” (ibid.:28–29). Thomas May and George Sandys “manifested a better taste in poetical translation” because they “have given to their versions [of Lucan and Ovid] both an ease of expression and a harmony of numbers, which make them approach very near to original composition,” masking both the second-order status of the translation and its domestication of the foreign text. For these translators who produced the sense of originality “have everywhere adapted their expression to the idiom of the language in which they wrote” (ibid.:68). The governing “precept,” Tytler states, is “That the translator ought always to figure to himself, in what manner the original author would have expressed himself, if he had written in the language of the translation” (ibid.:201). But the translator must also conceal the figural status of the translation, indeed confuse the domesticated figure with the foreign writer.
Tytler’s recommendations of fluency lead to the inscription of the foreign text with a rather conservative set of social representations. These include a squeamishness about physical references that enables his concept of “correct taste” to function as a cultural discourse by which the bourgeoisie and a bourgeois aristocracy express their superiority to {71} lower classes. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown,
within the symbolic discourse of the bourgeoisie, illness, disease, poverty, sexuality, blasphemy and the lower classes were inextricably connected. The control of the boundaries of the body (in breathing, eating, defecating) secured an identity which was constantly played out in terms of class difference.
Thus, Tytler finds that Homer betrays a tendency “to offend, by introducing low images and puerile allusions. Yet how admirably is this defect veiled over, or altogether removed, by his translator Pope” (Tytler 1978:79). Pope is praised for omitting “an impropriety,” Homer’s “compliment to the nurse’s waist”—in Tytler’s translation her “waist was elegantly girt”—as well as “one circumstance extremely mean, and even disgusting,” a “nauseous image” of Achilles as a child: in Tytler’s translation, “When I placed you on my knees, I filled you full with meat minced down, and gave you wine, which you vomited upon my bosom” (ibid.:49–50, 89–90). At other points, the process of domestication is explicitly class-coded, with the translator advised to inscribe the foreign text with elite literary discourses while excluding discourses that circulate among an urban proletariat:
If we are thus justly offended at hearing Virgil speak in the style of the Evening Post or the Daily Advertiser, what must we think of the translator, who makes the solemn and sententious Tacitus express himself in the low cant of the streets, or in the dialect of the waiters of a tavern?
Transparency, the “ease of original composition” in translation, was a genteel literary effect that avoided the “licentiousness” of popular oral genres:
The most correct taste is requisite to prevent that ease from degenerating into licentiousness. […] The most licentious of all translators was Mr Thomas Brown, of facetious memory, in whose translations from Lucian we have the most perfect ease; but it is the ease of Billingsgate and of Wapping.
{72} Ultimately, Tytler’s bourgeois valorization of transparent discourse to the exclusion of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque” reveals a class anxiety about the simulacral status of the translated text and the threat it poses to an individualistic concept of authorship (Bakhtin 1984). Stallybrass and White facilitate this critique of Tytler’s translation theory with their Bakhtinian history of the construction of authorship in England:
Jonson, Dryden, Pope and Wordsworth, each sought to legitimate his claim to the vocation of master-poet by disengaging himself from the carnivalesque scene so as to stand above it, taking up a singular position of transcendence. The traces of this labour, of this act of discursive rejection, are marked out by nothing so much as the poet’s attempt to found an illusory unity above and beyond the carnival. In each case, however, this apparently simple gesture of social superiority and disdain could not be effectively accomplished without revealing the very labour of suppression and sublimation involved.
Translation threatens the transcendental author because it submits his text to the infiltration of other discourses that are not bourgeois, individualistic, transparent. In Tytler’s case, there is a special concern that classical texts should not be carnivalized and degraded by translation strategies that do not implement canonical readings of those texts—colloquializing “the solemn and sententious Tacitus,” for example, or trashing the “strength united with simplicity” that is “characteristic of the language of Homer” by rendering his vulgarities. The very labour of suppression and sublimation involved in Tytler’s theory can be glimpsed in his willingness to risk compromising the canonicity of classical texts, admitting that they must be edited to fit his chastening, bourgeois readings of them. Insofar as Tytler’s neoclassicism comprehends a free translation method, it at once expresses and declares impossible a nostalgic dream of originality, the ancients’ proximity to “Nature,” representation and expression free of its discursive conditions.