The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

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translations of foreign literary texts, or abroad, in economic and
political relations with foreign countries.
Nott’s frequent travel, including a stint on a colonial expedition,
no doubt increased his willingness to resist domestic values. After
studying medicine in Paris as well as London, he spent years on the
Continent as physician to English travellers (1775–1777, 1786–1788,
1789–1793) and made a trip to China as surgeon on a vessel of the
East India Company (1783–1786). The class in which Nott travelled
must also be included among the conditions of his cultural work: the
aristocracy. His father held an appointment in the household of
George III, and Nott’s patients were generally aristocrats. This class
affiliation is important because it indicates a domestic motive for his
interest in foreignizing translation. As a physician, Nott was on
intimate terms with a group whose sexual practices, far from
exhibiting any bourgeois sense of moral propriety, rivalled those of
Catullus’s Rome in their variousness and sheer frequency, even if
they were discussed less openly and with greater refinement—
“gallantry” often served as a euphemism for adultery during this
period. Lawrence Stone has referred to “plenty of evidence that there
was a great deal of extramarital sexual activity among many
aristocratic husbands and some aristocratic wives at least as late as
the first decade of the nineteenth century” (Stone 1977:534; Perkin
1989:89–96).
In Nott’s case, we can be more specific. A confirmed bachelor
himself, he served as physician to Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess
of Devonshire, when she travelled on the Continent between 1789
and 1793 (Posonby 1955; DNB). The fashionable, trend-setting
Duchess had been banished abroad by her husband William, the
fifth Duke, because gambling losses had driven her deep into debt.
In 1792, the Duchess gave birth to a daughter who was assumed
to be the offspring of her adultery with Charles Grey, an aggressive
young politician who led the Whig party and later became Prime
Minister. The Duke himself fathered three illegitimate children, one
by a woman with whom he had an affair at the time of his
marriage, two by Lady Elizabeth Foster, who separated from her
own husband in 1782 and was befriended by the Duke and
Duchess. Nott’s interest in erotic literature, his refusal to expurgate
Catullus’s poetry, even the sexual frankness of his translations,
were due in some part to the casual sexual morality that
characterized his aristocratic milieu during the late eighteenth
century. His foreignization of the Latin text did in fact answer to