The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

132 The Translator’s Invisibility
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.
(ibid.:171–172)
The social function Arnold assigned translators like Newman was to
“correct” English cultural values by bringing them in line with
scholarly “opinion.” Translation for Arnold was a means to empower
an academic elite, to endow it with national cultural authority, but this
empowerment involved an imposition of scholarly values on other
cultural constituencies—including the diverse English-reading
audience that Newman hoped to reach. The elitism in Arnold’s concept
of a national English culture assumed an unbridgeable social division:
“These two impressions—that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned
reader—can, practically, never be accurately compared” (ibid.:201).
Translation bridges this division, but only by eliminating the
nonscholarly.
Arnold’s attack on Newman’s translation was an academic
repression of popular cultural forms that was grounded in a competing
reading of Homer. Where Arnold’s Homer was elitist, possessing
“nobility,” “a great master” of “the grand style,” New-man’s was
populist and, to Arnold, “ignoble.” Hence, Arnold insisted that
the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate
to render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both
noble and powerful: the ballad-manner and movement are often
either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and humdrum, so
not powerful.
(Arnold 1960:128)
Arnold rejected the use of the “ballad-manner” in various English
translations—Chapman’s Homer, Dr. William Maginn’s Homeric
Ballads and Comedies of Lucian (1850), Newman’s Iliad—because he
found it “over-familiar,” “commonplace,” “pitched sensibly lower
than Homer’s” verse (ibid.:117, 124, 155). Newman’s archaism in