venuti

Nation 141years this word was part of the lexicon of critical terms in the literaryperiodicals. In 1886, for example, The Athenaeum ran a favorablereview of Arthur Way’s translation of the Iliad, but the reviewernonetheless complained that “Mr. Way, in fact, is a little inclined to‘Newmanize’” because he “sometimes falls” into a “mongrelvocabulary,” deviating from current English usage: “Pure English ofthe simple sort is amply sufficient for the translating of Homer”(Athenaeum 1886:482–483).A foreignizing translation method similar to Newman’s wasadopted by another socially engaged Victorian translator, WilliamMorris. In this case, it was Morris’s socialist investment inmedievalism that led him to cultivate an archaic lexicon drawn fromvarious literary forms, elite and popular (cf. Chandler 1970:209–230).Morris’s experiments received much more appreciative reviews thanNewman’s, but they were also attacked, and for some of the samereasons. In 1888, the Quarterly Review ran an adulatory assessment ofArnold’s writing that extended his critique of Homeric translations toMorris’s Odyssey (1887–8): “By this travesty of an archaic diction, Mr.William Morris […] has overlaid Homer with all the grotesqueness,the conceits, the irrationality of the Middle Ages, as Mr. Arnold justlysays that Chapman overlaid him” (Quarterly Review 1888:407–408).In the same year, Longman’s Magazine, a monthly devoted tobringing “literature of a high standard” to a mass audience, ranan article in which Morris’s translations were cited as primeexamples of “Wardour-Street Early English—a perfectly modernarticle with a sham appearance of the real antique about it”(Ballantyne 1888:589; Sullivan 1984:209–213). This reference to theshops in Wardour Street that sold antique furniture, bothauthentic and imitation, questioned the authenticity of Morris’sarchaism while linking it to nonstandard English dialects andmarginal literary forms. The reviewer’s elitism was recognizablyArnoldian:Poems in which guests go bedward to beds that are arrayed rightmeet, poems in which thrall-folk seek to the feast-hall a-winter, donot belong to any literary centre. They are provincial; they areutterly without distinction; they are unspeakably absurd.(Ballantyne 1888:593)The “literary centre” was fluent translation. In 1889, the QuarterlyReview likewise attacked Morris’s Aeneid (1875) because of “the sense of