Since Newman developed his foreignizing method in the translation of classical texts, for him foreignizing necessarily involved a discourse that signified historical remoteness—archaism. In the preface to his selection from Horace, he faulted previous English versions because they modernized the Latin text: “Hitherto our poetical translators have failed in general, not so much from want of talent or learning, but from aiming to produce poems in modern style, through an excessive fear that a modern reader will endure nothing else” (Newman 1853:iv). In the preface to his Iliad, Newman defined more precisely the sort of archaism Homer required. Partly it was an effort to suggest an historical analogy between earlier forms of Greek and English: “The entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translation ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning” (Newman 1856:vi). Homer’s “style” required a like solution: “it is similar to the old English ballad, and is in sharp contrast to the polished style of Pope, Sotheby, and Cowper, the best known English translators of Homer” (ibid.:iv).
Yet Newman also made clear that he was “not concerned with the historical problem, of writing in a style which actually existed at an {123} earlier period in our language; but with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible” (Newman 1856:x). Hence, he advocated an artificially constructed archaism, patched together without an excessive regard for historical accuracy or consistency, producing an effect that he called “quaint” as opposed to “grotesque.” And he cultivated this discourse on various levels, in the lexicon, syntax, and prosody of his translations. He explained his use of syntactical “inversions,” for example, as “not mere metrical expedients, but necessities of the style; partly, to attain antiquity and elevation, partly for emphasis or for variety” (ibid.:xi).
Newman’s translations could only be foreignizing in a culturally specific sense, in relation to concepts of “domestic” and “foreign” that distinguished English literary culture in the Victorian period. Thus, he saw nothing inconsistent in faulting the modernizing tendencies of previous Horace translators while he himself expurgated the Latin text, inscribing it with an English sense of moral propriety. This is where Newman’s bourgeois paternalism contradicts the democratic tendencies of his populism:
I have striven to make this book admissable to the purest-minded English lady, and could never consent to add adornment to a single line of corrupting tendency. It exhibits, no doubt, mournful facts concerning the relations of the sexes in Augustan Rome,—facts not in themselves so shocking, as many which oppress the heart in the cities of Christendom; and this, I think, it is instructive to perceive. Only in a few instances, where the immorality is too ugly to be instructive have I abruptly cut away the difficulty. In general, Horace aimed at a higher beauty than did Catullus or Propertius or Ovid, and the result of a purer taste is closely akin to that of a sounder morality.
What was foreignizing about Newman’s translations was not their morality, but their literary discourse, the strangeness of the archaism. This too was homegrown, a rich stew drawn from various periods of English, but it deviated from current usage and cut across various literary discourses, poetry and the novel, elite and popular, English and Scottish. Newman’s Horace translation contained “viands,” for example, a word that surfaced at the beginning of the fifteenth century and was used extensively in the {124} early modern period in various kinds of writing, literary (Shakespeare’s plays) and nonliterary (Edward Hall’s historical chronicles). Yet it was also used later as a distinctly poetic form, a poeticism, in widely read Victorian writers like Tennyson and Dickens.[9] Newman’s archaic lexicon crossed, not only historical periods, but contemporary reading constituencies. The word “eld” appeared in his Horace translation after a succession of different uses—in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery (1820), Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847).
Newman’s version of the Iliad increased the density of the archaism, so that what may have been a recognizable poeticism now risked opacity and reader incomprehension. As if anticipating this risk, Newman appended a two-page “glossary” to the translation that provided his definitions for the archaic words. The glossary was a scholarly gesture that indicated the sheer heterogeneity of his lexicon, its diverse literary origins, and his readers no doubt found it useful when they took up other books, in various genres, periods, dialects. Newman used “callant” (“a young man”), an eighteenthcentury word that appeared in Scott’s Waverley (1814), and “gride” (“to cut gratingly”), a Spenserianism that appeared in Shelley’s Prometheus Bound (1821) and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). A brief catalogue suggests the inventiveness of Newman’s lexicon, its historical and cultural breadth, but also its occasional impenetrability: “behight,” “bragly” (“braw, proudly fine”), “bulkin” (“calf”), “choler,” “emprize,” “fain,” “gramsome” (“direful”), “hie,” “lief,” “noisome,” “ravin,” “sith,” “whilom,” “wight,” “wend.” There were even some Scottish words drawn from Burns and Scott, like “skirl,” meaning “to cry shrilly,” and “syne,” as in “lang syne” (“long ago”).
The foreignizing discourse of Newman’s translations definitely registered on contemporary readers. The London Quarterly Review included Newman’s Horace in two review essays that surveyed English versions of the odes, past and present. Although these essays were published more than fifteen years apart (1858 and 1874), they both disapproved of Newman’s strategies and expressed a preference for a modernized Horace, rendered fluently, in immediately intelligible English:
It is an all-prevading and persistent fault in this translation, that obscure and antiquated forms of expression are used, instead of {125} simple and modern English. Thus we find, in the very first Ode, such expressions as “Lydian eld,” “quirital mob.” Elsewhere we find such phrases as “tangled fields” (whatever this means), “the sage thrice-aged.”
This was a criticism that crossed political lines, appearing not only in the Tory London Quarterly, but the liberal National Review, to which Newman was a contributor (Sullivan 1984:237–242). The reviewer of Newman’s Iliad for the National expressed some agreement with him, admitting that “a style in some sort archaic is no doubt desirable, and even necessary, to represent a poet such as Homer” (National Review 1860:292). But Newman’s archaism was attacked for deviating too far from the familiar, the transparent:
we cannot but consider that Mr Newman’s diction is needlessly antiquated and uncouth; and that, although he has not admitted any expressions which are unintelligible from their antiquity, he has omitted to observe the further caution, that archaism should not appear plainly to be constrained or assumed, lest a laboured, artificial style of English should suggest the idea of a laboured, artificial style of Greek, than which nothing can be more opposite to Homer.
[9]
For the diversity of the Victorian reading audience, see Altick 1957. For the meanings and uses of English archaisms, I have relied on the OED.