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274 The Translator’s InvisibilityThe ideal situation occurs, my friend believed, when thetranslator discovers his author at the start of both their careers.In this instance, the translator can closely follow the author’sprogress, accumulating exhaustive knowledge of the foreigntexts, strengthening and developing the affinity which he alreadyfeels with his author’s ideas and tastes, becoming, in effect, of thesame mind. When simpatico is present, the translation process canbe seen as a veritable recapitulation of the creative process bywhich the original came into existence; and when the translatoris assumed to participate vicariously in the author’s thoughts andfeelings, the translated text is read as the transparent expressionof authorial psychology or meaning. The voice that the readerhears in any translation made on the basis of simpatico is alwaysrecognized as the author’s, never as a translator’s, nor even assome hybrid of the two.My friend’s ideas about translation still prevail today in Anglo-American culture, although they have dominated English-languagetranslation at least since the seventeenth century. The earl ofRoscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684) recommended that thetranslatorchuse an Author as you chuse a Friend:United by this Sympathetick Bond,You grow Familiar, Intimate, and Fond;Your Thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,No longer his Interpreter, but He.(Steiner 1975:77)Alexander Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1798) assertedthat if the translator’s aim is fluency, “he must adopt the very soul ofhis author” (Tytler 1978:212). John Stuart Blackie’s article on theVictorian translation controversy, “Homer and his translators” (1861),argued that “the successful translator of a poet must not only be a poethimself, but he must be a poet of the same class, and of a kindredinspiration,” “led by a sure instinct to recognise the author who iskindred to himself in taste and spirit, and whom he therefore has aspecial vocation to translate” (Blackie 1861:269, 271). Burton Raffel’sreview of the Zukofskys’ modernist Catullus similarly argued that theoptimal conditions for translating the Latin texts include “(a) a poet, (b)an ability to identify with, to almost be Catullus over a protractedperiod, and (c) great good luck” (Raffel 1969:444).