The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

lower classes. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown,
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within the symbolic discourse of the bourgeoisie, illness, disease,
poverty, sexuality, blasphemy and the lower classes were
inextricably connected. The control of the boundaries of the body (in
breathing, eating, defecating) secured an identity which was
constantly played out in terms of class difference.
(Stallybrass and White 1986:167)
Thus, Tytler finds that Homer betrays a tendency “to offend, by
introducing low images and puerile allusions. Yet how admirably is
this defect veiled over, or altogether removed, by his translator Pope”
(Tytler 1978:79). Pope is praised for omitting “an impropriety,”
Homer’s “compliment to the nurse’s waist”—in Tytler’s translation her
“waist was elegantly girt”—as well as “one circumstance extremely
mean, and even disgusting,” a “nauseous image” of Achilles as a child:
in Tytler’s translation, “When I placed you on my knees, I filled you
full with meat minced down, and gave you wine, which you vomited
upon my bosom” (ibid.:49–50, 89–90). At other points, the process of
domestication is explicitly class-coded, with the translator advised to
inscribe the foreign text with elite literary discourses while excluding
discourses that circulate among an urban proletariat:
If we are thus justly offended at hearing Virgil speak in the style of
the Evening Post or the Daily Advertiser, what must we think of the
translator, who makes the solemn and sententious Tacitus express
himself in the low cant of the streets, or in the dialect of the waiters
of a tavern?
(ibid.:119)
Transparency, the “ease of original composition” in translation, was a
genteel literary effect that avoided the “licentiousness” of popular oral
genres:
The most correct taste is requisite to prevent that ease from
degenerating into licentiousness. […] The most licentious of all
translators was Mr Thomas Brown, of facetious memory, in whose
translations from Lucian we have the most perfect ease; but it is the
ease of Billingsgate and of Wapping.
(ibid.:220–221)