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Canon 81Here the reviewer’s “liberal” stance reveals the same contradictionbetween humanism and cultural elitism that emerged in Frere:Aristophanic comedy “could not be altogether without attractionsfor the philosophic mind, that explores the principles of humannature, or the cultivated taste, that delights in the triumph of genius”(ibid.:277). Not unexpectedly, the “qualities” that distinguishAristophanes as “somewhat above the coarse apprehension of amere mob, and fit to gain applause more precious than theunintellectual roar of plebeian acclamation,” are characteristic oftransparent discourse: “both clear and perspicuous,—terse and yetmagnificent,—powerful and ethical,” “that unfailing fluency andcopiousness” (ibid.:278, 282).IIIThe canonization of fluency in English-language translationduring the early modern period limited the translator’s optionsand defined their cultural and political stakes. A translator couldchoose the now traditional domesticating method, anethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to dominant culturalvalues in English; or a translator could choose a foreignizingmethod, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register thelinguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text. Around theturn of the nineteenth century, the values in question, althoughstated somewhat contradictorily in various treatises, translators’prefaces, and reviews, were decidedly bourgeois—liberal andhumanist, individualistic and elitist, morally conservative andphysically squeamish. The ways in which they constrained thetranslator’s activity, the forms of submission and resistance thata translator might adopt under their domination, becomestrikingly evident with the first book-length translations ofCatullus into English, the versions of Dr. John Nott (1795) and theHonourable George Lamb (1821).Before these translations appeared, Catullus had long occupied afoothold in the canon of classical literature in English. Editions of theLatin text were available on the Continent after the fifteenth century,and even though two more centuries passed before it was publishedin England, Catullus had already been imitated by a wide range ofEnglish poets—Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller,Robert Herrick, among many others (McPeek 1939; Wiseman1985:chap. VII). Still, Catullus’s place in English literary culture,