venuti

136 The Translator’s InvisibilityClassical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy,of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various, shall all berendered in one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of wordsand in diction, closely approximate to polished prose.(ibid.:88)Newman’s reply showed that translation could permit other,popular literary discourses to emerge in English only if it wasforeignizing, or, in the case of classical literature, historicizing,only if it abandoned fluency to signify “the archaic, the rugged,the boisterous element in Homer” (Newman 1861:22). BecauseNewman’s historiography was essentially Whiggish, assuming ateleological model of human development, a liberal concept ofprogress, he felt that Homer “not only was antiquated, relativelyto Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being a poet of abarbarian age” (ibid.:48). 11 Newman admitted that it was difficultto avoid judging past foreign cultures according to the culturalvalues—both academic and bourgeois—that distinguishedVictorian elites from their social inferiors in England andelsewhere. He believed thatif the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at firstmove in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simplemelody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearingtwenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and lossof moral expression; and should judge the style to be as inferior to ourown oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-ratemodern music.(ibid.:14)Yet Newman nonetheless insisted that such Anglocentric judgmentsmust be minimized or avoided altogether: “to expect refinement anduniversal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quiteanachronistic and unreasonable” (ibid.:73). In arguing for a historicistapproach to translation, Newman demonstrated that scholarlyEnglish critics like Arnold violated their own principle of universalreason by using it to justify an abridgement of the Greek text:Homer never sees things in the same proportions as we see them. Toomit his digressions, and what I may call his “impertinences,” inorder to give his argument that which Mr. Arnold is pleased to call