Fagles also follows—even if in a flexible way—Arnold’s recommendation of hexameters for Homeric translation: “Working from a loose five- or six-beat line but inclining more to six, I expand at times to seven beats […] or contract at times to three” (ibid.:xi).
The Victorian controversy offers several lessons that can be brought to bear on contemporary English-language translation. Perhaps most importantly, the controversy shows that domesticating translation can be resisted without necessarily privileging a cultural elite. Newman advocated Schleiermacher’s foreignizing method, but he detached it from the cultural and political interests of a German literary coterie, at once elitist and nationalist. Newman instead assumed a more democratic concept of an English national culture, acknowledging its diversity and refusing to allow a cultural minority like the academy to dominate the nation. Newman was a scholar who truly believed that an English translator could address diverse cultural constituencies, satisfying scholarly canons of translation equivalence while appealing to popular taste: “While I profess to write for the unlearned English reader, yet I must necessarily be judged by classical scholars on the question of fidelity and correctness” (Newman 1853:vi).
{146} Yet the “foreign” in Newman’s foreignizing translations was defined precisely by his resistance to academic literary values, by his aim to encompass rather than exclude popular forms affiliated with various social groups. Foreignizing translation is based on the assumption that literacy is not universal, that communication is complicated by cultural differences between and within linguistic communities. But foreignizing is also an attempt to recognize and allow those differences to shape cultural discourses in the target language. Arnold’s advocacy of domesticating translation also did not assume a homogeneous national culture—indeed, for him the diversity of English literature meant chaos. Arnold’s response to cultural differences was to repress them, hewing to the dominant tradition in English-language translation and empowering an academic elite to maintain it. Newman demonstrated, however, that foreignizing translation can be a form of resistance in a democratic cultural politics.
The Victorian controversy also offers a practical lesson for contemporary English-language translators. It shows that close translation, what Arnold called Newman’s “literalness,” does not necessarily lead to unidiomatic, unintelligible English. Schleiermacher suggested that “the more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original, the more foreign it will seem to the reader” (Lefevere 1977:78), and Newman likewise argued that “in many passages it is of much value to render the original line by line” (Newman 1856:viii–ix), incurring Arnold’s satire for verbatim renderings of Homeric epithets—“ashen-speared,” “brazen-cloaked” (Arnold 1960:165). But Newman’s close adherence to the lineation and word-order of the Greek text was matched by an equally close attention to a distinctly English lexicon, syntax, and range of literary forms. Close translation certainly risks obscure diction, awkward constructions, and hybrid forms, but these vary in degree from one foreign text to another and from one domestic situation to another. Detections of “translationese” assume an investment in specific linguistic and cultural values to the exclusion of others. Hence, close translation is foreignizing only because its approximation of the foreign text entails deviating from dominant domestic values—like transparent discourse.
What is “literal” about this method is that it focuses on the letter of the translation as well as the foreign text, emphasizing the signifier, the signifying play that routinely gets fixed in English-language translation, reduced to a relatively coherent signified. Newman’s foreignizing translation released this play, adding a surplus of domestic meanings to the foreign text by encompassing various {147} English-language cultural discourses, past and present, elite and popular, poetic and novelistic, English and Scottish. In foreignizing translation, the ethnocentric violence that every act of translating wreaks on a foreign text is matched by a violent disruption of domestic values that challenges cultural forms of domination, whether nationalist or elitist. Foreignizing undermines the very concept of nation by invoking the diverse constituencies that any such concept tends to elide.
Chapter 4. Dissidence
The fundamental error of the translator is that he stabilizes the state in which his own language happens to find itself instead of allowing his language to be powerfully jolted by the foreign language.
The search for alternatives to the domesticating tradition in English-language translation leads to various foreignizing practices, both in the choice of foreign texts and in the invention of translation discourses. A translator can signal the foreignness of the foreign text, not only by using a discursive strategy that deviates from the prevailing hierarchy of domestic discourses (e.g. dense archaism as opposed to fluent transparency), but also by choosing to translate a text that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the target language. Foreignizing translation is a dissident cultural practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developing affiliations with marginal linguistic and literary values at home, including foreign cultures that have been excluded because of their own resistance to dominant values.[1] On the one hand, foreignizing translation enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text by enlisting it in a domestic cultural political agenda, like dissidence; on the other hand, it is precisely this dissident stance that enables foreignizing translation to signal the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text and perform a work of cultural restoration, admitting the ethnodeviant and potentially revising domestic literary canons.
The translation projects of the Italian writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839–1869) offer a provocative way to explore these issues. Tarchetti belonged to the Milanese movement known as the {149} scapigliatura, a loosely associated group of artists, composers, and writers who contested bourgeois values in their bohemianism (scapigliato means “dishevelled”) and in their formal innovations. The literary members of this dissident group were at variance with the highly conservative realism that dominated Italian fiction since Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (1827, rev. 1840). And some of them abandoned Manzoni’s sentimental Christian providentialism for a democratically oriented representation of class divisions, realistic but also romantic, historically detailed yet melodramatic, often with a topical engagement in events surrounding the Italian Unification, like the Austrian presence or the Italian conscript army (Carsaniga 1974).
Tarchetti’s first novel, Paolina (1865), followed a seamstress who is persecuted by an aristocrat and ultimately raped and murdered. His second novel, Una nobile follia (A Noble Madness) (1866–1867), a protest against the new standing army, focused on a military officer moved to desertion by distracted, pacifistic musings. The book caused an uproar in the press, and copies were openly burned at many barracks. Tarchetti’s later narratives took more experimental forms. Fosca (1869), a semi-autobiographical novel about a pathological love affair, mixed several fictional discourses—romantic, fantastic, realistic, naturalistic—to counter the notion of character as a unified subjectivity (Caesar 1987). In a number of short narratives, some of which were posthumously published in 1869 as Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales), Tarchetti deployed the conventions and motifs of nineteenth-century fantasy to issue a fundamental challenge to realist representation and its ideological grounding in bourgeois individualism.
[1]
My concept of foreignizing translation as a “dissident” cultural practice is indebted to Alan Sinfield’s work on political forms of literary criticism, notably 1992. Especially pertinent to the politics of foreignizing translation is Sinfield’s remark that “political awareness does not arise out of an essential, individual, self-consciousness of class, race, nation, gender, or sexual orientation; but from involvement in