The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

94 The Translator’s Invisibility
Oblivion in which he has been so long buried” (Nott 1778:vii). Finding
it “astonishing, considering his merit,” that Propertius had never been
translated into English, Nott intended his version “to repair this
neglect” (Nott 1782: iii–iv). For Nott, translation performed the work of
cultural restoration by revising the canon of foreign literature in
English, supporting the admission of some marginalized texts and
occasionally questioning the canonicity of others. In his preface to his
selection from the Persian poet Hafiz, Nott boldly challenged the
English veneration of classical antiquity by suggesting that western
European culture originated in the east:
we lament, whilst years are bestowed in acquiring an insight into
the Greek and Roman authors, that those very writers should have
been neglected, from whom the Greeks evidently derived both the
richness of their mythology, and the peculiar tenderness of their
expressions.
(Nott 1787:v–vi)
Nott attacked any Anglocentric dismissal of Oriental poets like Hafiz,
arguing the importance of “not judging of the glow of Eastern dialogue
by the standard of our colder feelings and ideas,” and he went so far
as to suggest that “the more exact rules of English criticism and taste”
were complicit in English imperialism:
Was it not probable to suppose, when a fatal ambition had
determined us to possess a country, our distance from which made
the attempt unnatural; and when, under the pretence of commerce,
we became the cruel invaders of another’s right; that we should at
least have made ourselves acquainted with the language of the
conquered? This was necessary, whether to distribute justice, or to
exercise compassion. But private avarice and extortion shut up the
gates of public virtue.
(ibid.:vii)
Of course Nott’s foreignizing translation method could never be
entirely free of domestic values and agendas, including the
development of a national culture: he felt, for example, that the failure
to translate Propertius caused “some degradation to English literature”
(Nott 1782:iv). But he was sufficiently sensitive to the ethnocentric
violence involved in any encounter with a cultural other to question
the imposition of bourgeois canons and interests, whether at home, in