The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Nation 139
Newman’s “aberrations” were the same ones that Arnold noticed,
especially the archaism, which the reviewer described as “a
consistent, though we think mistaken theory” (ibid.:96). The
Saturday Review’s distaste for Newman’s translation was in turn
consistent with its other literary judgments: it tended to ridicule
literary experiments that deviated from transparent discourse, like
Robert Browning’s “obscure” poetry, and to attack literary forms
that were populist as well as popular, like Dickens’s novels
(Bevington 1941:208–209, 155–167).
The liberal British Quarterly Review, a nonconformist religious
periodical edited by a Congregationalist minister, questioned
Arnold’s desire “to imitate in England the French Academy”
(British Quarterly Review 1865:292; Houghton et al. 1987:IV, 114–
125). This was considered “an intellectual foppery” since the
fundamental individualism of English culture resisted any notion
of a national academy: “Mr. Arnold seems determined to ignore the
fact that an academic style is impossible among the English, who
are by nature original” (British Quarterly Review 1865:292). Yet the
reviewer agreed “that Homeric translation demands a noble
simplicity,” adding that
unquestionably Mr. Arnold is right in placing Homer in a very
different class from the ballad-poets with whom he has frequently
been compared. The ballad, in its most perfect form, belongs to a
rude state of society—to a time when ideas were few. This cannot be
said of Homer. His very existence is sufficient proof of a social
development quite equal to that of Shakespeare’s time, though far
simpler in its form.
(ibid.:293)
The reviewer assumed both Newman’s historicist concept of the
ballad and the Whig historiography on which it was based. But
Newman’s populist reading of Homer was rejected in favor of
Arnoldian nobility. This move made a liberal periodical like the British
Quarterly Review no different from the Tory Dublin University
Magazine, in which a review of two hexameter translations inspired
by Arnold’s lectures singled out Newman’s version for special
criticism: “his unrhymed ballad metre, his quaint flat diction, and his
laughtermoving epithets” amounted to an “unlucky burlesque”
(Dublin University Magazine 1862:644; Sullivan 1983b:119–123).
Newman’s verse form was described as “the mongrel ballad measure