venuti

lower classes. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown,Canon 71within the symbolic discourse of the bourgeoisie, illness, disease,poverty, sexuality, blasphemy and the lower classes wereinextricably connected. The control of the boundaries of the body (inbreathing, eating, defecating) secured an identity which wasconstantly played out in terms of class difference.(Stallybrass and White 1986:167)Thus, Tytler finds that Homer betrays a tendency “to offend, byintroducing low images and puerile allusions. Yet how admirably isthis defect veiled over, or altogether removed, by his translator Pope”(Tytler 1978:79). Pope is praised for omitting “an impropriety,”Homer’s “compliment to the nurse’s waist”—in Tytler’s translation her“waist was elegantly girt”—as well as “one circumstance extremelymean, and even disgusting,” a “nauseous image” of Achilles as a child:in Tytler’s translation, “When I placed you on my knees, I filled youfull with meat minced down, and gave you wine, which you vomitedupon my bosom” (ibid.:49–50, 89–90). At other points, the process ofdomestication is explicitly class-coded, with the translator advised toinscribe the foreign text with elite literary discourses while excludingdiscourses that circulate among an urban proletariat:If we are thus justly offended at hearing Virgil speak in the style ofthe Evening Post or the Daily Advertiser, what must we think of thetranslator, who makes the solemn and sententious Tacitus expresshimself in the low cant of the streets, or in the dialect of the waitersof a tavern?(ibid.:119)Transparency, the “ease of original composition” in translation, was agenteel literary effect that avoided the “licentiousness” of popular oralgenres:The most correct taste is requisite to prevent that ease fromdegenerating into licentiousness. […] The most licentious of alltranslators was Mr Thomas Brown, of facetious memory, in whosetranslations from Lucian we have the most perfect ease; but it is theease of Billingsgate and of Wapping.(ibid.:220–221)