In modern style, our classical scholars at an early period introduced from Latin a principle which seems to me essentially unpopular, viz., to end a clause with than he, than thou, than she, &c., where they think a nominative is needed. […] I cannot listen to unsophisticated English talk, without being convinced that in old English the words me, thee, him, &c., are not merely accusatives, but are also the isolated {129} form of the pronoun, like moi, toi, lui. In reply to the question, “Who is there?” every English boy or girl answers Me, until he or she is scolded into saying I. In modern prose the Latinists have prevailed; but in a poetry which aims to be antiquated and popular, I must rebel.
The “popular” in Newman’s translation was a contemporary construction of an archaic form that carried various ideological implications. It drew on an analogous Greek form affiliated with a nationalist movement to win political autonomy from foreign domination (or, more precisely, a criminal fringe of this movement, the Klepht resistance). And it assumed an English culture that was national yet characterized by social divisions, in which cultural values were ranged hierarchically among various groups, academic and nonacademic. Newman’s archaism constituted the democratic tendency in his concept of the English nation because it was populist, assigning popular cultural forms a priority over the academic elite that sought to suppress them. He thought of the ballad as “our Common Metre” (Newman 1856:vii).
Newman’s Iliad received little attention in the periodicals—until, several years later, Matthew Arnold decided to attack it in a lecture series published as On Translating Homer (1861). Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, described the lectures as an effort “to lay down the true principles on which a translation of Homer should be founded,” and these were principles diametrically opposed to Newman’s (Arnold 1960:238). Arnold wanted translation to transcend, rather than signify, linguistic and cultural differences, and so he prized the illusionism of transparent discourse, using the “strange language” of mystical transcendence to describe the process of domestication:
Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place
and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling on the {130} translator’s part—“defecates to a pure transparency,” and disappears.
In this remarkable analogy, Arnold’s translation “principles” assumed a Christian Platonic metaphysics of true semantic equivalence, whereby he demonized (or fecalized) the material conditions of translation, the target-language values that define the translator’s work and inevitably mark the source-language text. Current English “modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling” must be repressed, like a bodily function; they are “alien” excrement soiling the classical text. This is an antiquarianism that canonized the Greek past while approaching the English present with a physical squeamishness. Arnold didn’t demonize all domestic values, however, since he was in fact upholding the canonical tradition of English literary translation: following Denham, Dryden, Tytler, Frere, he recommended a free, domesticating method to produce fluent, familiar verse that respected bourgeois moral values. The difference between the foreign text and English culture “disappears” in this tradition because the translator removes it—while invisibly inscribing a reading that reflects English literary canons, a specific interpretation of “Homer.” In Arnold’s case,
So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect.
For Arnold, what determined familiarity of effect was not merely transparent discourse, fluency as opposed to “literalness,” but the prevailing academic reading of Homer, validated by scholars at Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford. Indeed, Arnold’s main contention—and the point on which he differed most from Newman—was that only readers of the Greek text were qualified to evaluate English versions of it: “a competent scholar’s judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original” (Arnold 1960:201). Throughout the lectures Arnold repeatedly set forth this “effect” in authoritative statements: “Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is {131} noble in manner” (ibid.:141). Using this explicitly academic reading, Arnold argued that various translators, past and present, “have failed in rendering him”: George Chapman, because of “the fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain directness of Homer’s thought and feeling”; Pope, because of his “literary artificial manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer”; William Cowper, because of his “elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer”; and, finally, Newman, whose “manner” was “eminently ignoble, while Homer’s manner is eminently noble” (ibid.:103). Here it becomes clear that Newman’s translation was foreignizing because his archaism deviated from the academic reading of Homer:
Why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They are faulty, first, because, as a matter of diction, the expressions “O gentle friend,” “eld,” “in sooth,” “liefly,” “advance,” “man-ennobling,” “sith,” “any-gait,” and “sly of foot,” are all bad; some of them worse than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions profess to render.
Arnold’s critique of Newman’s translation was informed by a concept of English culture that was nationalist as well as elitist. To demonstrate the effect of familiarity that a scholar experiences before the Greek text, Arnold gave examples of English “expressions” that he called “simple,” transparently intelligible, but that also constituted Anglocentric stereotypes of foreign cultures, implicitly racist:
[Greek] expressions seem no more odd to [the scholar] than the simplest expressions in English. He is not more checked by any feeling of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than when he reads in an English book “the painted savage,” or, “the phlegmatic Dutchman.”
In Arnold’s view, Newman’s translation demonstrated the need for an academic elite to establish national cultural values:
{132} I think that in England, partly from the want of an Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected by it.