venuti

38 The Translator’s Invisibility“catamite” was replaced by “bedfellow” (ibid.:32). This change bringsthe English closer to the Latin (“contubernium”), but it also improvesthe fluency of Graves’s prose by replacing an archaism with a morefamiliar contemporary usage. The revision is obviously too small tominimize the homophobia in the passages.Pound’s version of “The Seafarer” also cannot be simplyquestioned as too free because it is informed by the scholarlyreception of the Anglo-Saxon text. As Bassnett has suggested, hisomission of the Christian references, including the homileticepilogue (ll. 103–124), is not so much a deviation from the textpreserved in the Exeter Book, as an emendation that responds to akey question in historical scholarship: “Should the poem beperceived as having a Christian message as an integral feature, or arethe Christian elements additions that sit uneasily over the paganfoundations?” (Bassnett 1980:96). In English Literature from theBeginning to the Norman Conquest, for example, Stopford Brookeasserted that “it is true, the Seafarer ends with a Christian tag, butthe quality of its verse, which is merely homiletic, has made capablepersons give it up as a part of the original poem” (Brooke 1898:153).Pound’s translation can be considered accurate according to earlytwentieth-century academic standards, a translation that issimultaneously a plausible edition of the Anglo-Saxon text. Hisdepartures from the Exeter Book assumed a cultural situation inwhich Anglo-Saxon was still very much studied by readers, whocould therefore be expected to appreciate the work of historicalreconstruction implicit in his version of the poem.The symptomatic reading is an historicist approach to the study oftranslations that aims to situate canons of accuracy in their specificcultural moments. Critical categories like “fluency” and “resistancy,”“domesticating” and “foreignizing,” can only be defined by referringto the formation of cultural discourses in which the translation isproduced, and in which certain translation theories and practices arevalued over others. At the same time, however, applying these criticalcategories in the study of translations is anachronistic: they arefundamentally determined by a cultural political agenda in thepresent, an opposition to the contemporary dominance of transparentdiscourse, to the privileging of a fluent domesticating method thatmasks both the translator’s work and the asymmetrical relations—cultural, economic, political—between English-language nations andtheir others worldwide. Although a humanist theory and practice oftranslation is equally anachronistic, inscribing the foreign-language