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Nation 121translation, describing it as mere snobbery that ironically degradedclassical literature by limiting its audience: “It would be no honor tothe venerable productions of antiquity, to imagine that all theirexcellencies vanish with translation, and only a mean exclusiveness ofspirit could grudge to impart as much as possible of their instruction tothe unlearned” (ibid.:9). To Newman, “exclusive” meant specialized,but also elitist.It seems clear that only foreignizing translation could answer toNewman’s concept of liberal education, to his concern with therecognition of cultural differences. His introductory lecture arguedthat literary texts were particularly important in staging thisrecognition because “literature is special, peculiar; it witnesses, andit tends to uphold, national diversity” (Newman 1841:10). In thepreface to his version of the Iliad, he offered a concise account of histranslation method by contrasting it with the “principles which Iregard to be utterly false and ruinous to translation.” The principlesNewman opposed belonged to the fluent, domesticating methodthat dominated English translation since the seventeenth century:One of these is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget thatit is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he isreading an original work. Of course a necessary inference fromsuch a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour isundesirable 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 alreadyfamiliar in English. From such a notion I cannot too stronglyexpress my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite;—toretain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able, withthe greater care, the more foreign it may happen to be,—whether itbe a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals. […] the Englishtranslator should desire the reader always to remember that hiswork is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; thatthe original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlikeour native compositions.(Newman 1856:xv–xvi)For Newman, the “illusion” of originality that confused the translationwith the foreign text was domesticating, assimilating what was foreign“to something already familiar in English.” He recommended atranslation method that signified the many differences between the