venuti

66 The Translator’s Invisibilitynow increasingly bourgeois as well as aristocratic. It becamefashionable to subscribe to Pope’s translation: over 40 percent of thenames on the lists for his Iliad were titled, and the MPs included bothTories and Whigs. 9 Fluent translating remained affiliated with theBritish cultural elite, and its authority was so powerful that it couldcross party lines. Pope described the privileged discourse in hispreface:It only remains to speak of the Versification. Homer (as has beensaid) is perpetually applying the Sound to the Sense, and varyingit on every new Subject. This is indeed one of the most exquisiteBeauties of Poetry, and attainable by very few: I know only ofHomer eminent for it in the Greek, and Virgil in Latine. I am sensibleit is what may sometimes happen by Chance, when a Writer iswarm, and fully possest of his Image: however it may bereasonably believed they designed this, in whose Verse it somanifestly appears in a superior degree to all others. Few Readershave the Ear to be Judges of it, but those who have will see I haveendeavoured at this Beauty.(Pope 1967:20–21)Pope manifests the distinctive blind spot of domesticatingtranslation, confusing, under the illusion of transparency, theinterpretation/translation with the foreign text, even with the foreignwriter’s intention, canonizing classical writing on the basis ofEnlightenment concepts of poetic discourse, a metrical facilitydesigned to reduce the signifier to a coherent signified, “perpetuallyapplying the Sound to the Sense.” The fluency of Pope’s Homer setthe standard for verse translations of classical poetry, so that, asPenelope Wilson notes,we find the ancient poets emerging from the mill of decorum inmore or less undifferentiated batches of smooth rhyme, or blankverse, and elegant diction. They are generally met by reviewers withcorrespondingly vague commendations such as ‘not less faithfulthan elegant’; and when they are condemned, they are more oftencondemned on stylistic grounds than on those of accuracy.(Wilson 1982:80)In the eighteenth century, stylistic elegance in a translation canalready be seen as symptomatic of domestication, bringing the