The ideological configuration of Newman’s writing uneasily combined liberalism with a paternalistic investment in bourgeois moral values, and this also played into his translation projects, which were fundamentally pedagogical and populist. He published Latin versions of the popular literature he assigned his students for class translation exercises: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem Hiawatha (1862) and Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1884). The readership he imagined for his translations of Horace (1853) and the Iliad (1856) did not know Latin and Greek or were too busy or bored to maintain languages they learned at university—in Newman’s words, “the unlearned English reader,” “those who seek solely for amusement,” including “men of business,” “commercial England,” but also the socially diverse audience of “Dickens and Thackeray” (Newman 1853:iii–v). Compared to Schleiermacher, Newman enlisted translation in a more democratic cultural politics, assigned a pedagogical function but pitched deliberately against an academic elite. For Newman, {120} the aim of education was to foster liberal democracy. In his lecture On the Relations of Free Knowledge to Moral Sentiment, he argued that the study of “political economy” teaches a respect for cultural differences that militates against imperialism, nationalism, and class domination:
political economy has demonstrated that the laws which morality would dictate as just are also the laws of physical well being for nations and for classes; that no cunning regulations will enable a State to prosper at the expense of foreigners; and that the interests of classes and of nations are so knit up, that one cannot permanently be depressed without injury to others. It rescues the patriot from the temptation of being unjust to the foreigner, by proving that that does not conduce to the welfare of his own people.
Newman similarly urged the study of history, literary as well as political, because it can “deepen our knowledge of mankind, and our insight into social and political interests” (ibid.:8). Here too the “practical uses” of this knowledge required the recognition of cultural differences. In Four Lectures on the Contrasts of Ancient and Modern History, Newman granted the central metaphysical assumption of Enlightenment humanism—“The whole interest of History depends upon the eternal likeness of human nature to itself”—but only to give it a more materialist revision, mindful of historical change: “it is equally needful to be aware of the points at which similarity ceases, and contrast begins; otherwise our applications of history to practical uses will be mere delusive pedantry” (Newman 1847a:5–6).
Newman’s “practical” concept of education led him to criticize academic specialization because it decreased the social value of knowledge. In his Introductory Lecture to the Classical Course at Manchester New College, he asserted that
we do not advocate any thing exclusive. A one-sided cultivation may appear at first like carrying out the principle of division of labour, yet in fact it does not tend even to the general benefit and progress of truth, much less to the advantage of the individual.
Although intended to justify the place of classics in an academic curriculum, Newman’s lecture attacked the scholarly disdain of {121} translation, describing it as mere snobbery that ironically degraded classical literature by limiting its audience: “It would be no honor to the venerable productions of antiquity, to imagine that all their excellencies vanish with translation, and only a mean exclusiveness of spirit could grudge to impart as much as possible of their instruction to the unlearned” (ibid.:9). To Newman, “exclusive” meant specialized, but also elitist.
It seems clear that only foreignizing translation could answer to Newman’s concept of liberal education, to his concern with the recognition of cultural differences. His introductory lecture argued that literary texts were particularly important in staging this recognition because “literature is special, peculiar; it witnesses, and it tends to uphold, national diversity” (Newman 1841:10). In the preface to his version of the Iliad, he offered a concise account of his translation method by contrasting it with the “principles which I regard to be utterly false and ruinous to translation.” The principles Newman opposed belonged to the fluent, domesticating method that dominated English translation since the seventeenth century:
One of these is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work. Of course a necessary inference from such a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour is undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in English. From such a notion I cannot too strongly express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite;—to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able, with the greater care, the more foreign it may happen to be,—whether it be a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals. […] the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native compositions.
For Newman, the “illusion” of originality that confused the translation with the foreign text was domesticating, assimilating what was foreign “to something already familiar in English.” He recommended a translation method that signified the many differences between the {122} translation and the foreign text, their relative autonomy from one another, their composition in different languages for different cultures. Yet rejecting the illusion of originality meant opposing the discourse that shapes most of “our native compositions”—fluency. Newman felt that his translations were resisting a contemporary standardization of English enforced by the publishing industry:
In the present day, so intensely mechanical is the apparatus of prose-composition,—when editors and correctors of the press desire the uniform observance of some one rule (never mind what, so that you find it in the “standard” grammar),—every deviation is resented as a vexatious eccentricity; and in general it would appear, that dry perspicuity is the only excellence for which the grammarian has struggled. Every expression which does not stand the logical test, however transparent the meaning, however justified by analogies, is apt to be condemned; and every difference of mind and mind, showing itself in the style, is deprecated.