venuti

142 The Translator’s Invisibilityincongruity inspired by such Wardour-Street English as eyen and clepe”(Faulkner 1973:28, n. 81). Here the “centre” is also identified asstandard English, the language of contemporary political insitutions,leading politicians. The Longman’s article on “Wardour-Street English”observed thatif the Lord Chancellor or Mr. Speaker were to deliver one of thesesolemn pronouncements in any cockney or county dialect, he wouldleave upon his hearers the same sense of the grotesque and theundignified which a reader carries away from an author who,instead of using his own language in its richest and truest literaryform, takes up a linguistic fad, and, in pursuit of it, makes his workprovincial instead of literary.(Ballantyne 1888:593–594)Morris’s translations did no more than “pretend to be literature,”because literary texts were written in a dialect of English that waseducated and official and thus excluded popular linguistic and literaryforms.“Wardour-Street English” eventually came to be used as a term ofabuse for archaic diction in any kind of writing—applied to widely readhistorical novels, particularly imitations of Scott, but also to nonfictionprose, including an eccentric volume like The Gate of Remembrance (1918).Produced by the director of the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey,F.Bligh Bond, this was an attempt to enlist “psychical research” in the“work of architectural exploration” (Spectator 1918:422). Bligh’s volumepresented the “automatic writing” of one “J.A.,” in which the historicalassociations of the abbey were personified and given voice in variouslanguages: Latin (“William the Monk”), Anglo-Saxon (“Awfwold yeSaxon”), and a mixture of Middle and Early Modern English (“Johannes,Lapidator or Stone-Mason,” “defunctus anno 1533”). The reviewer forthe Spectator judged this linguistic experiment favorably, but got morepleasure from the Latin, which, he felt, “is much to be preferred to theWardour Street English” assigned to the stonemason (ibid.:422).Interestingly, the passage of automatic writing quoted by the reviewerlinks English archaism once again to the unlearned, the subordinate: itshows the stonemason resisting the use of Latin architectural termsimposed on him by monkish treatises:Ye names of builded things are very hard in Latin tongue—transome, fanne tracery, and the like. My son, thou canst not