In Frere’s case, fluency meant a linguistic homogenization that avoided, not merely archaism, but “associations exclusively belonging to modern manners,” generalizing the foreign text by removing as many of the historically specific markers as possible. The translator must,
if he is capable of executing his task upon a philosophic principle, endeavour to resolve the personal and local allusions into the genera, of which the local or personal variety employed by the original author, is merely the accidental type; and to reproduce them in one of those permanent forms which are connected with the universal and immutable habits of mankind.
Frere rationalized these admitted “liberties” by appealing to a “philosophic principle”:
The proper domain of the Translator is, we conceive, to be found in that vast mass of feeling, passion, interest, action and habit which is common to mankind in all countries and in all ages; and which, in all languages, is invested with its appropriate forms of expression, capable of representing it in all its infinite varieties, in all the permanent distinctions of age, profession and temperament.
In Frere’s view, a fluent strategy enables the translation to be a transparent representation of the eternal human verities expressed by the foreign author.
The principle on which Frere’s theory rests is the principle that can now be recognized as central to the history of fluent translation: liberal humanism, subjectivity seen as at once self-determining and determined by human nature, individualistic yet generic, transcending cultural difference, social conflict, and historical change to represent “every shade of the human character” (Frere 1820:481). And, like preceding versions of this principle, Frere’s may appear to be democratic in its appeal to what is “common to mankind,” to a {80} timeless and universal human essence, but it actually involved an insidious domestication that allowed him to imprint the foreign text with his conservative sexual morality and cultural elitism. He made plain his squeamishness about the physical coarseness of Aristophanic humor, its grotesque realism, and felt the need to explain it away as inconsistent with the author’s intention: the “lines of extreme grossness” were “forced compromises,” “which have evidently been inserted, for the purpose of pacifying the vulgar part of the audience, during passages in which their anger, or impatience, or disappointment, was likely to break out” (ibid.:491). Hence, “in discarding such passages,” Frere asserted, “the translator is merely doing that for his author, which he would willingly have done for himself”—were he not “often under the necessity of addressing himself exclusively to the lower class” (ibid.:491), Frere’s advocacy of a fluent strategy was premised on a bourgeois snobbery, in which the moral and political conservatism now ascendant in English culture resulted in a call for a bowdlerized Aristophanes that represented the “permanent” class divisions of humanity, what Frere described as “that true comic humour which he was directing to the more refined and intelligent part of his audience” (ibid.:491). For Frere, “the persons of taste and judgment, to whom the author occasionally appeals, form, in modern times, the tribunal to which his translator must address himself” (ibid.:491).
The Edinburgh Review criticized Mitchell’s Aristophanes on the basis of similar philosophical and political assumptions, although formulated with an explicitly “liberal” difference. The reviewer’s Aristophanes approached his audience with a democratic inclusiveness—“The smiles of the polite few were not enough for the comedian,—he must join them to the shouts of the million”—and since “for all tastes he had to cater,” the playwright came to assume several social functions, “Public Satirist,” “State Journalist,” “Periodical Critic” (Edinburgh Review 1820:280)—an Aristophanes modelled on the Edinburgh’s own self-image as a liberal magazine. Unlike Frere, this reviewer sighs with relief that Mitchell “does not mean to publish a Family Aristophanes,” alluding to the title of Thomas Bowdler’s expurgated edition of Shakespeare (Bowdler 1818), and no offense was taken at Mitchell’s language. The problem for the Edinburgh reviewer was rather Mitchell’s description of Aristophanes’ “audience as usually made up of a mere ‘rabble,’ ripe for nothing but ‘the nonsense of holiday revelry,’ and totally unfit to appreciate merit of an higher order” (Edinburgh Review 1820:275).
{81} Here the reviewer’s “liberal” stance reveals the same contradiction between humanism and cultural elitism that emerged in Frere: Aristophanic comedy “could not be altogether without attractions for the philosophic mind, that explores the principles of human nature, or the cultivated taste, that delights in the triumph of genius” (ibid.:277). Not unexpectedly, the “qualities” that distinguish Aristophanes as “somewhat above the coarse apprehension of a mere mob, and fit to gain applause more precious than the unintellectual roar of plebeian acclamation,” are characteristic of transparent discourse: “both clear and perspicuous,—terse and yet magnificent,—powerful and ethical,” “that unfailing fluency and copiousness” (ibid.:278, 282).
The canonization of fluency in English-language translation during the early modern period limited the translator’s options and defined their cultural and political stakes. A translator could choose the now traditional domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to dominant cultural values in English; or a translator could choose a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the values in question, although stated somewhat contradictorily in various treatises, translators’ prefaces, and reviews, were decidedly bourgeois—liberal and humanist, individualistic and elitist, morally conservative and physically squeamish. The ways in which they constrained the translator’s activity, the forms of submission and resistance that a translator might adopt under their domination, become strikingly evident with the first book-length translations of Catullus into English, the versions of Dr John Nott (1795) and the Honourable George Lamb (1821).
Before these translations appeared, Catullus had long occupied a foothold in the canon of classical literature in English. Editions of the Latin text were available on the Continent after the fifteenth century, and even though two more centuries passed before it was published in England, Catullus had already been imitated by a wide range of English poets—Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller, Robert Herrick, among many others (McPeek 1939; Wiseman 1985:chap. VII). Still, Catullus’s place in English literary culture, {82} even if supported by such culturally prominent writers, was rather minor. There were few translations, usually of the same small group of kiss and sparrow poems, showing quite clearly that he was virtually neglected by English translators in favor of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace: these were the major figures, translated in the service of diverse aesthetic, moral, and political interests. Catullus’s marginality was partly an issue of genre, with epic privileged over lyric in English poetry translation during this period. But there was also the issue of morality, with English writers at once attracted and disturbed by the pagan sexuality and the physically coarse language, entertaining a guilty fixation on the poet’s scandalous affair with “Lesbia.”
The first substantial selected translation, the anonymous Adventures of Catullus, and History of His Amours with Lesbia (1707), was itself a translation from the French, Jean de la Chapelle’s Les Amours de Catulle. It consisted of several narrative sections, some in the voices of Catullus and Lesbia, punctuated by versions of the Latin texts, all arranged to support “a train of Historical Conjectures [which] have so great a foundation in the poet’s own Verses” (The Adventures of Catullus 1707:A2r). For the English editor, the book was didactic, “one of the severest Lessons against our Passions and Vices”; but since it was described as “a just Representation of the Nobility of Antient Rome, in a private Life, in their Friendships, Conversation, and Manners within Doors,” the editor was also assimilating Roman aristocratic culture to bourgeois values like emotional intimacy and moral propriety and perhaps questioning the “private life” of the British aristocracy: the book was dedicated to the earl of Thomond (ibid.:A2v–A3v). In his Lives of the Roman Poets (1733), Lewis Crusius, anxiously feeling the need for a “justification of this Writer [who] has been very much censured for the Lewdness of some of his Pieces,” asked the English reader to respect the historical and cultural difference of Catullus’s poetry, its different sexual morality: