George Lamb (1784–1834) was born into the same aristocratic milieu as Nott, but thirty years later. The fourth and youngest son of Penniston, Viscount Melbourne, he practiced law for a short While, but left it to pursue various literary and theatrical interests, reviewing for the Edinburgh, contributing prologues to revivals at the Drury Lane, and writing a comic opera that was staged at Covent Garden (Gentleman’s Magazine 1834:437–438; DNB). He eventually entered politics, first as an MP in the Duke of Devonshire’s interest and then, on the accession of the Whig ministry, as Under Secretary of State to his brother William, Lord Melbourne. In 1809, George married Caroline St. Jules, one of the Duke of Devonshire’s illegitimate children with Lady Foster; George’s own birth was illegitimate, the result of Lady Melbourne’s adultery with the Prince of Wales. Everyone concerned knew of these relations.[16] It was Lamb who informed Caroline of her father’s identity a few years before their marriage. The Duke gave her a dowry of £30,000; Lamb’s response was that “I can only thank him by devoting my future life to Caroline’s happiness” (Posonby 1955:4). The knowledge of these relations extended past the family. In the obituary on Lamb in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Caroline was described as “a relation of the Duke of the Devonshire” (Gentleman’s Magazine 1834:438). Still, everything was treated very discreetly. Lady Foster concocted a genealogy to explain Caroline’s unusual name, “a certain obscure Comte de St. Jules being the supposed father” (Posonby 1955:4). The most public scandal in Lamb’s family did not involve him: in 1812, Lady Caroline Lamb, his brother William’s wife, was engaged in a notorious affair with Byron. George himself seems to have been happily married. His obituary referred to “the tranquillity of his domestic life,” stating that with the “estimable” Caroline, “of a character entirely assorting with his own, he enjoyed the truest domestic felicity” (Gentleman’s Magazine 1834:438).
Lamb’s life attests to the fact that the increasing moral conservatism of English society during this period was affecting not only the middle and working classes, but the aristocracy as well. This bourgeois cultural movement toward moral reform, spurred by the rise of Evangelical Christianity and accompanied by the institution of various philanthropic “societies,” led to the proliferation of moral and religious tracts and continued the bowdlerization of literary texts that {97} characterized English poetry translation at least since Pope (Quinlan 1941; Perkin 1989:90, 120–121, 240).[17] Lamb’s first-hand knowledge of the casual sexual morality among the Whig aristocracy may have made him more receptive to the emergent conservatism in English culture, since there can be no doubt that he contributed to it. His work in the theatre included an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (Lamb 1816), whose goal, he announced in an “Advertisement,” was “to restore Shakespeare to the stage, with no other omissions than such as the refinement of manners has rendered necessary.” Lamb omitted this dialogue, for example, between Timon and “the churlish Philosopher” Apemantus:
Tim. Wilt thou dine with me, Apemantus?
Apem. No; I eat not lords.
Tim. And thou shouldst, thou’dst anger ladies.
Apem. O they eat lords; so they come by great bellies.
Tim. That’s a lascivious apprehension.
Apem. So thou apprehend’st it; take it for thy labour.
Lamb treated Shakespeare just as he did Catullus, expurgating the text of any coarse language, and his like-minded contemporaries approved of his work, with one commentator observing that “much is omitted in the dialogue, and generally with propriety” (Genest 1832:584). Lamb saw no contradiction between professing liberalism as a Whig politician and censoring canonical literary texts. He followed what David Cecil has called the “canons of Whig orthodoxy. All believed in ordered liberty, low taxation and the enclosure of land; all disbelieved in despotism and democracy” (Cecil 1965:7).[18] Lamb’s calculated omission of the carnivalesque in his literary projects must be taken as another gesture of social superiority by a member of the hegemonic class. Lamb’s elitism, however, was couched in terms that were belletristic instead of sociaclass="underline" he viewed a poetry translation or a theatrical adaptation as a refined form of entertainment, an exercise in aesthetic appreciation performed during periods of leisure, often in private. He prefaced his Catullus translation with a poem entitled “Reflections before Publication,” wherein he presented his work, not as an engaged act of cultural restoration or canon revision, but as the “pleasing” diversion of an amateur who is now contemplating whether to share it with others:
Lamb was one of those future aristocrats for whom Sir John Denham developed the domesticating method of translating classical poetry, shrinking from the prospect of publication because poetry translation was not the serious work of politics or government service. And with an appropriateness that Denham would have appreciated, Lamb’s courtly self-effacement was cast in fluent heroic couplets.
In the thirty years that separated Nott’s Catullus from Lamb’s, the Whiggish aristocratic milieu in which they lived and worked underwent a substantial change that influenced the fate of their translations and translation methods. Fluent, domesticating translation was valorized in accordance with bourgeois moral and literary values, and a notable effort of resistance through a foreignizing method was decisively displaced. Nott’s translation foreignized Catullus by assimilating the Latin text to cultural values that were residual in the 1790s and marginal by the 1820s: a mimetic concept of translation grounded in the paradigm of representation was yielding to a communicative concept of translation grounded in the paradigm of expression; and the casual sexual morality of the aristocracy was challenged by a movement toward moral reform that affected both aristocrat and bourgeois. Nott and Lamb exemplify the two options available to translators at a specific moment in the canonization of fluency. Perhaps most importantly, they show that in foreignizing translation, the difference of the foreign text can only ever be figured by domestic values that differ from those in dominance.
Chapter 3. Nation
The translator who attaches himself closely to his original more or less abandons the originality of his nation, and so a third comes into existence, and the taste of the multitude must first be shaped towards it.
[16]
The parentage of Lamb and Caroline St. Jules is discussed by Posonby 1955:2–5, Stuart 1955:160–163, 184, and Cecil 1965:27.
[17]
Quinlan notes that “the taste for Evangelical literature had eventually pervaded all ranks of society. Even among the upper classes there were many, like Lord Melbourne, who read theology and biblical criticism for pleasure” (Quinlan 1941:271).
[18]
Lamb’s politics is also discussed by Dunckley 1890:83–84, 106–107. Quinlan notes that “as compared with the strict Evangelicals who indiscriminately banned all novels and plays, the expurgators might consider themselves liberals, taking a middle course at a time when the most severe censors could not tolerate polite literature in any form” (Quinlan 1941:229).