The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

70 The Translator’s Invisibility
the ideas of the original,” as well as the “privilege” of “correcting
what appears to him a careless or inaccurate expression of the
original, where that inaccuracy seems materially to affect the sense”
(ibid.:54). Of course, what is “correct” is always a domestic value,
including the discursive effect that dominates English culture at
that moment, transparency. Hence, Tytler’s third and final “law” is
“That the Translation should have all the ease of original
composition” (ibid.:15).
Good translators implement fluent strategies: they avoid
syntactical fragmentation, polysemy (“which, by the bye, is always
a defect in composition” (Tytler 1978:28)), sudden shifts in
discursive registers. Tytler praises Henry Steuart, “Esq.,” “the
ingenious translator of Sallust,” for his “version of a most difficult
author, into easy, pure, correct, and often most eloquent language”;
Steuart recognized “the fruitlessness of any attempt to imitate the
abrupt and sententious manner” of the Latin text (ibid.:188–189). Of
Arthur Murphy’s Tacitus, Tytler remarks, “We most admire the
judgment of the translator in forbearing all attempt to rival the
brevity of the original, since he knew it could not be attained but
with the sacrifice both of ease and perspicuity” (ibid.:186–187). “To
imitate the obscurity or ambiguity of the original, is a fault; and it
is still a greater, to give more than one meaning” (ibid.:28–29).
Thomas May and George Sandys “manifested a better taste in
poetical translation” because they “have given to their versions [of
Lucan and Ovid] both an ease of expression and a harmony of
numbers, which make them approach very near to original
composition,” masking both the second-order status of the
translation and its domestication of the foreign text. For these
translators who produced the sense of originality “have everywhere
adapted their expression to the idiom of the language in which they
wrote” (ibid.:68). The governing “precept,” Tytler states, is “That the
translator ought always to figure to himself, in what manner the
original author would have expressed himself, if he had written in
the language of the translation” (ibid.:201). But the translator must
also conceal the figural status of the translation, indeed confuse the
domesticated figure with the foreign writer.
Tytler’s recommendations of fluency lead to the inscription of the
foreign text with a rather conservative set of social representations.
These include a squeamishness about physical references that enables
his concept of “correct taste” to function as a cultural discourse by which
the bourgeoisie and a bourgeois aristocracy express their superiority to