The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Nation 121
translation, describing it as mere snobbery that ironically degraded
classical literature by limiting its audience: “It would be no honor to
the venerable productions of antiquity, to imagine that all their
excellencies vanish with translation, and only a mean exclusiveness of
spirit could grudge to impart as much as possible of their instruction to
the unlearned” (ibid.:9). To Newman, “exclusive” meant specialized,
but also elitist.
It seems clear that only foreignizing translation could answer to
Newman’s concept of liberal education, to his concern with the
recognition of cultural differences. His introductory lecture argued
that literary texts were particularly important in staging this
recognition because “literature is special, peculiar; it witnesses, and
it tends to uphold, national diversity” (Newman 1841:10). In the
preface to his version of the Iliad, he offered a concise account of his
translation method by contrasting it with the “principles which I
regard to be utterly false and ruinous to translation.” The principles
Newman opposed belonged to the fluent, domesticating method
that dominated English translation since the seventeenth century:
One of these is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that
it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is
reading an original work. Of course a necessary inference from
such a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour is
undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems,
must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original,
unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already
familiar in English. From such a notion I cannot too strongly
express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite;—to
retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able, with
the greater care, the more foreign it may happen to be,—whether it
be a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals. […] the English
translator should desire the reader always to remember that his
work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that
the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike
our native compositions.
(Newman 1856:xv–xvi)
For Newman, the “illusion” of originality that confused the translation
with the foreign text was domesticating, assimilating what was foreign
“to something already familiar in English.” He recommended a
translation method that signified the many differences between the