The reviewer preferred a reading experience that allowed the English version to pass as a true equivalent of “Homer” while repressing the status of Newman’s text as a translation, the sense that the archaism was calculated by the translator, “assumed.”
As this passage suggests, however, Newman’s translations seemed foreign, not only because their “strained archaic quaintness” preempted the illusion of transparency, but also because they constituted a reading of the foreign text that revised prevailing critical opinion. Newman’s decision to translate Horace into unrhymed verse with various accentual meters ignored what the London Quarterly Review called “the dignity and the music of the Latin,” “the grace and sweetness of the original” (London Quarterly Review 1858:192; 1874:18). As a result, Newman’s version appeared “somewhat quaint and harsh,” whereas “the rhymed versions of Lord Ravensworth and of Mr Theodore Martin” possessed “the qualities of easy elegance, of sweetness of cadence” (London Quarterly Review 1858:192–3; 1874:16, 19). The reviewers looked for a fluent, iconic meter, sound imitating {126} sense to produce a transparent poem, but they also assumed that Horace would have agreed:
Now and then Professor Newman surprises us with a grateful [sic] flow of verse:—
There is something of the rush of cool waters here. But what would Horace say, if he could come to life, and find himself singing the two stanzas subjoined?—
This is hard to read, while the Latin is as pleasant to the ear as the fountain which it brings before us to the imagination.
The reviewers’ negative evaluations rested on a contradiction that revealed quite clearly the domestic cultural values they privileged. In calling for a rhymed version, they inscribed the unrhymed Latin text with the verse form that dominated current English poetry while insisting that rhyme made the translation closer to Horace. The reviewers were articulating a hegemonic position in English literary culture, definitely slanted toward an academic elite: Horace’s text can be “pleasant to the ear” only for readers of Latin. Yet this academic reading was also presented in national cultural terms, with the reviewers assimilating Horace to traditional English prosody:
{127} To discard the old machinery of recurrent rhymes, which has grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of our poetical language, to set aside the thousand familiar and expected effects of beat, and pause, and repetition, and of the modulation of measuresound that makes the everchanging charm of lyrical verse—to set aside all this for the disappointing, unfamiliar machinery of verses, each with a different ending, unrelieved by any new grace of expression, any new harmony of sound, is simply the work of a visionary, working not for the enjoyment of his readers, but the gratification of a crotchety and perverted taste.
This call for a domesticated Horace was motivated by a nationalist investment in “the strength of our poetical language.” Newman’s version was “perverted” because it was un-English: “to have to break up all our English traditions for something utterly novel and yet mediocre, is a severe demand to make from the great public which reads for pleasure” (London Quarterly Review 1858:193). Newman tested the reviewers’ assumption that the English reading audience wanted every foreign text to be rewritten according to dominant literary values. Yet the very heterogeneity of his translations, their borrowings from various literary discourses, gave the lie to this assumption by pointing to the equally heterogeneous nature of the audience. Newman’s foreignized texts were challenging an elitist concept of a national English culture.
The cultural force of his challenge can be gauged from the reception of his Iliad. Newman’s foreignizing strategy led him to choose the ballad as the archaic English form most suitable to Homeric verse. And this choice embroiled him in a midcentury controversy over the prosody of Homeric translations, played out both in numerous reviews and essays and in a spate of English versions with the most different verse forms: rhymed and unrhymed, ballad meter and Spenserian stanza, hendecasyllabics and hexameters. Here too the stakes were at once cultural—competing readings of the Greek texts—and political— competing concepts of the English nation.
Newman used ballad meter for his Iliad because he sought “a poetry which aims to be antiquated and popular” (Newman 1856:xii). “The style of Homer,” he argued, “is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous, abounding with formulas, redundant in particles and affirmatory interjections, as also in grammatical connectives of time, place, and argument” (ibid.:iv). He defined the “popular” aspect {128} of the Greek text historically, as the product of an oral archaic culture at a rudimentary level of literary development, “a stage of the national mind in which divisions of literature were not recognized [,] even the distinction of prose and poetry” (ibid.:iv). But he also located contemporary “popular” analogues, English as well as Greek. In choosing the ballad, Newman recalled, “I found with pleasure that I had exactly alighted on the metre which the modern Greeks adopt for the Homeric hexameter” in what he called “the modern Greek epic” (ibid.:vii–viii). The texts in question were actually ballads sung by nineteenth-century mountain brigands in the Peloponnese, “Klephts,” who fought in the Greek resistance against the Turkish Empire.[10]
The English analogues Newman cited were equally “modern”—contemporary versions of archaic forms. He argued that “our real old ballad-writers are too poor and mean to repesent Homer, and are too remote in diction from our times to be popularly intelligible” (Newman 1856:x). To secure this “popular” intelligibility, his translation reflected the archaism in the English historical novel and narrative poem: he thought Scott would have been an ideal translator of Homer. Yet Newman’s discourse was also explicitly oral, unlearned, and English, his syntactical inversions approximated current English speech:
in all lively conversation we use far more inversion than in the style of essay-writing; putting the accusative before the verb, beginning a sentence with a predicate or with a negative, and in other ways approaching to the old style, which is truly native to every genuine Englishman.
This was a concept of “the old style” that was nationalist as well as populist. Newman’s “Saxo-Norman” lexicon “owe[d] as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning” (ibid.:vi). And the “several old-fashioned formulas” he used opposed academic prescriptions for English usage:
[10]
Newman referred to the “modern Greek Epic metre” in his 1851 review article, where he quoted from “a well-known patriotic address stimulating the Greeks to free themselves from Turkey” (Newman 1851:390). His use of the “modern Greek Klephtic ballad” is noticed in the