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124 The Translator’s Invisibilityearly modern period in various kinds of writing, literary(Shakespeare’s plays) and nonliterary (Edward Hall’s historicalchronicles). Yet it was also used later as a distinctly poetic form,a poeticism, in widely read Victorian writers like Tennysonand Dickens. 9 Newman’s archaic lexicon crossed, not onlyhistorical periods, but contemporary reading constituencies.The word “eld” appeared in his Horace translation after asuccession of different uses—in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage(1812),Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery (1820), Longfellow’sEvangeline (1847).Newman’s version of the Iliad increased the density of thearchaism, so that what may have been a recognizable poeticism nowrisked opacity and reader incomprehension. As if anticipating thisrisk, Newman appended a two-page “glossary” to the translationthat provided his definitions for the archaic words. The glossary wasa scholarly gesture that indicated the sheer heterogeneity of hislexicon, its diverse literary origins, and his readers no doubt foundit useful when they took up other books, in various genres, periods,dialects. Newman used “callant” (“a young man”), an eighteenthcenturyword that appeared in Scott’s Waverley (1814), and “gride”(“to cut gratingly”), a Spenserianism that appeared in Shelley’sPrometheus Bound (1821) and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). A briefcatalogue suggests the inventiveness of Newman’s lexicon, itshistorical and cultural breadth, but also its occasionalimpenetrability: “behight,” “bragly” (“braw, proudly fine”),“bulkin” (“calf”), “choler,” “emprize,” “fain,” “gramsome”(“direful”), “hie,” “lief,” “noisome,” “ravin,” “sith,” “whilom,”“wight,” “wend.” There were even some Scottish words drawn fromBurns and Scott, like “skirl,” meaning “to cry shrilly,” and “syne,”as in “lang syne” (“long ago”).The foreignizing discourse of Newman’s translations definitelyregistered on contemporary readers. The London Quarterly Reviewincluded Newman’s Horace in two review essays that surveyedEnglish versions of the odes, past and present. Although these essayswere published more than fifteen years apart (1858 and 1874), theyboth disapproved of Newman’s strategies and expressed a preferencefor a modernized Horace, rendered fluently, in immediately intelligibleEnglish:It is an all-prevading and persistent fault in this translation, thatobscure and antiquated forms of expression are used, instead of

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