The extreme impropriety of many Poems written by Catullus, has obliged Mr Lamb to omit them, and had he turned his attention wholly to some purer author, it would have honoured his powers of selection. At this hour of contest between the good and evil principle among us, when so many are professedly Atheists, and blasphemy is encouraged by subscription, and sedition supported by charities, no patriot and christian would assist vice by palliating its excesses, or render them less offensive by a decent veil. […] Mr Lamb is entitled to both the above characters of patriot and christian.
{93} Reviewers also faulted Nott’s translation for lacking fluency. The Monthly Review remarked that “we would praise this translator for his general correctness with respect to the English version, yet his inattention to rhime is too gross and too frequent not to incur censure” (Monthly Review 1797:278). The British Critic complained of “great irregularities both with regard to the spirit, correctness, and harmony” (British Critic 1798:671–672). Lamb’s prosody was apparently not spirited enough for several reviewers—his versions of the “minor pieces” get described as “languid,” or devoid of “poetical ease and beauty”—but at least one magazine, the Monthly Review, found that he “preserved no small portion of the spirit and dignity of the original,” singling out Lamb’s rendering of Carmen V for special praise as “the best which we have seen, with the exception only of Ben Jonson’s,” recognizing Lamb’s Catullus as a peculiarly English phenomenon, indicative of the dominance of fluency in poetry translation (Monthly Review 1822:11, 9).
We can more fully understand the translators’ different motives and methods by considering their translations in the context of their other work, their lives, and their different historical moments. A practicing physician who was constantly engaged in literary projects, Nott (1751–1825) published a number of books that drew impressively on the tradition of the love lyric in classical, European, and Oriental languages (Gentleman’s Magazine 1825:565–566; DNB). Late in his career, he wrote a prose romance entitled Sappho (1803), made a selection from Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1810), and edited a miscellany of sixteenth-century English poetry beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1812). The bulk of his work, however, was translation, and over a thirty-year period he produced book-length translations of Johannes Secundus Nicolaius (1775), Petrarch (1777), Propertius (1782), Hafiz (1787), Bonefonius (1797), Lucretius (1799), and Horace (1803). The Catullus translation (1795) was an obvious choice for a translator with Nott’s interests and energies.
He was so prolific because he felt that more was at stake in translating than literary appreciation, even though aesthetic values always guided his choices as well. The mimetic concept of translation that made him choose a foreignizing method to preserve the difference of the foreign text also made him think of his work as an act of cultural restoration. This was the rationale he often gave in his prefatory statements. His “Attempt to transfer unblemished into the English language the numberless Beauties with which the Basia of Secundus abound” was intended to draw “a deserving Author from that {94} Oblivion in which he has been so long buried” (Nott 1778:vii). Finding it “astonishing, considering his merit,” that Propertius had never been translated into English, Nott intended his version “to repair this neglect” (Nott 1782: iii–iv). For Nott, translation performed the work of cultural restoration by revising the canon of foreign literature in English, supporting the admission of some marginalized texts and occasionally questioning the canonicity of others. In his preface to his selection from the Persian poet Hafiz, Nott boldly challenged the English veneration of classical antiquity by suggesting that western European culture originated in the east:
we lament, whilst years are bestowed in acquiring an insight into the Greek and Roman authors, that those very writers should have been neglected, from whom the Greeks evidently derived both the richness of their mythology, and the peculiar tenderness of their expressions.
Nott attacked any Anglocentric dismissal of Oriental poets like Hafiz, arguing the importance of “not judging of the glow of Eastern dialogue by the standard of our colder feelings and ideas,” and he went so far as to suggest that “the more exact rules of English criticism and taste” were complicit in English imperialism:
Was it not probable to suppose, when a fatal ambition had determined us to possess a country, our distance from which made the attempt unnatural; and when, under the pretence of commerce, we became the cruel invaders of another’s right; that we should at least have made ourselves acquainted with the language of the conquered? This was necessary, whether to distribute justice, or to exercise compassion. But private avarice and extortion shut up the gates of public virtue.
Of course Nott’s foreignizing translation method could never be entirely free of domestic values and agendas, including the development of a national culture: he felt, for example, that the failure to translate Propertius caused “some degradation to English literature” (Nott 1782:iv). But he was sufficiently sensitive to the ethnocentric violence involved in any encounter with a cultural other to question the imposition of bourgeois canons and interests, whether at home, in {95} translations of foreign literary texts, or abroad, in economic and political relations with foreign countries.
Nott’s frequent travel, including a stint on a colonial expedition, no doubt increased his willingness to resist domestic values. After studying medicine in Paris as well as London, he spent years on the Continent as physician to English travellers (1775–1777, 1786–1788, 1789–1793) and made a trip to China as surgeon on a vessel of the East India Company (1783–1786). The class in which Nott travelled must also be included among the conditions of his cultural work: the aristocracy. His father held an appointment in the household of George III, and Nott’s patients were generally aristocrats. This class affiliation is important because it indicates a domestic motive for his interest in foreignizing translation. As a physician, Nott was on intimate terms with a group whose sexual practices, far from exhibiting any bourgeois sense of moral propriety, rivalled those of Catullus’s Rome in their variousness and sheer frequency, even if they were discussed less openly and with greater refinement— “gallantry” often served as a euphemism for adultery during this period. Lawrence Stone has referred to “plenty of evidence that there was a great deal of extramarital sexual activity among many aristocratic husbands and some aristocratic wives at least as late as the first decade of the nineteenth century” (Stone 1977:534; Perkin 1989:89–96).
In Nott’s case, we can be more specific. A confirmed bachelor himself, he served as physician to Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, when she travelled on the Continent between 1789 and 1793 (Posonby 1955; DNB). The fashionable, trend-setting Duchess had been banished abroad by her husband William, the fifth Duke, because gambling losses had driven her deep into debt. In 1792, the Duchess gave birth to a daughter who was assumed to be the offspring of her adultery with Charles Grey, an aggressive young politician who led the Whig party and later became Prime Minister. The Duke himself fathered three illegitimate children, one by a woman with whom he had an affair at the time of his marriage, two by Lady Elizabeth Foster, who separated from her own husband in 1782 and was befriended by the Duke and Duchess. Nott’s interest in erotic literature, his refusal to expurgate Catullus’s poetry, even the sexual frankness of his translations, were due in some part to the casual sexual morality that characterized his aristocratic milieu during the late eighteenth century. His foreignization of the Latin text did in fact answer to {96} domestic values, however different from those that influenced the periodical reviewers and Lamb.