TRANSLATION THEORY OF THE

NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH

CENTURIES IN BRITAIN
In Britain, the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century focused on the status of
the ST and the form of the TL. Typical of this is the polemic between Francis Newman and Matthew
Arnold over the translation of Homer (see Venuti 1995: 118–41; see also Robinson 1997b: 250–8).
Newman emphasized the foreignness of the work by a deliberately archaic translation and yet saw
himself as reaching out to a wide audience. This was violently opposed by Matthew Arnold in his lecture
On Translating Homer (1861/1978), which advocated a transparent translation method. Importantly,
Arnold, whose argument won the day, advises his audience to put their faith in scholars, who, he
suggests, are the only ones who are qualified to compare the effect of the TT to the ST. As Bassnett
(2002: 75) points out, such an elitist attitude led both to the devaluation of translation (because it was
felt that a TT could never reach the heights of a ST and it was always preferable to read the work in the
original language) and to its marginalization (translations were to be produced for only a select élite).
This attitude may even be said to be prevalent in Britain up to the present day. For example, pre-
university and even university students of languages are often dissuaded from turning to translations for
help; very little popular literature is translated into English; relatively few subtitled foreign films are
screened in mainstream cinemas and on the major BBC and ITV television channels in the UK.

The Iliad and the articles: Francis William

Newman's reply to Matthew Arnold
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Francis William Newman's The Iliad of Homer Faithfully Translated into Unrhymed
English Metre (1856) was famously criticized by Matthew Arnold in On Translating
Homer (1861) as "ignoble," and the criticism stuck. The literary and theological
debates of the 1860s, however, was informed by a growing uncertainty regarding
the distinctions between sacred and non-sacred ancient texts, as evidenced by the
uproar over Essays and Reviews (1860). The disagreement between Arnold and
Newman regarding the Iliad was in fact rooted in the broader theological
disagreements that were then threatening the Anglican Church, especially attitudes
toward the validity and role of the Thirty-nine Articles. By re-examining the Homeric
debate in its original context, this essay illuminates important complexities of
Anglicanism in the 1860s and demonstrates that readings of the Iliad were
dependent on religiously-granted authority.

**********

Several witnesses at the recent Cork assizes were inadvertently sworn on Homer's
Iliad instead of the Gospels. The judges accepted the oaths as valid.
("Miscellaneous," The Derby Mercury, 11 February 1863, p. 6)

In the 1860s, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey managed to maintain their culturally
canonized status in Britain even as religiously canonized Christian texts such as the
Pentateuch and the four gospels were increasingly coming under critical attack. As
William Lucas Collins wrote in an 1862 Blackwood's review of translations of the
Odyssey, "To most observers the wonder probably is, that in this utilitarian age,
when men live fast and work hard, the old belief in the infallibility of the classics
should be almost the only one which has remained unshaken" (345).

This unshaken faith in the infallibility of the classics is perhaps best demonstrated
in Matthew Arnold's debate with Francis William Newman over the translation of
the Iliad. In Arnold's On Translating Homer lectures in 1860 and 1861, the Oxford
Professor of Poetry, with his high view of Homer's work, claimed that translations of
Homer should be rapid, plain, direct, and noble, and that the best meter in which to
accomplish such a translation was the hexameter. Arnold detailed how past
translations of the Iliad had failed by neglecting his precepts, and he spent much of
his second lecture pointedly attacking Francis William Newman's The Iliad of Homer
Faithfully Translated into Unrhymed English Metre (1856) for its perceived lack of
"nobility." (1) Francis Newman, younger brother of the Cardinal and a scholar of
wide-ranging interests and considerable acumen, responded in June with Homeric
Translation in Theory and Practice: A Reply to Matthew Arnold. In this pamphlet,
Newman explained the scholarly reasons for his translation choices and faulted
Arnold for his dogmatic critical authority, an authority that had no basis in
scholarship but rather in Arnold's elevated respect for Homer and in unanswerable
questions of taste. Newman disagreed that Homer's poetry was uniformly noble
but instead maintained that the poetry's style rose and fell with its subject. Failing
to take Newman's hint that Arnold should avoid dogmatic critical authority, Arnold
answered Newman with his authoritatively titled Last Words, given as an Oxford
lecture in November of 1861...
Newman vs. Arnold

Several of the lectures were afterward published as critical essays, but the
most substantial fruits of his professorship were the three lectures On
Translating Homer (1861)—in which he recommended Homer’s plainness and
nobility as medicine for the modern world, with its “sick hurry and divided
aims” and condemned Francis Newman’s recent translation as ignoble and
eccentric—and the lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in which,
without much knowledge of his subject or of anthropology, he used the Celtic
strain as a symbol of that which rejects the despotism of the commonplace and
the utilitarian.

Francis Newman
Francis W. Newman (1805-97), Professor of Latin at London University, was for a time as
well known as his brother, John Henry Newman. He was an incredibly learned, eccentric
man who wrote on theology, vegetarianism, political economy - on almost any topic. For
Arnold, Newman represented undisciplined learning and inadequate literary sense. He
coined from Newman the derisive verb 'to Newmanise'. Most of the contemporary
reviewers seem to have agreed with Arnold's estimate of Newman, but they thought
Arnold too harsh in his attack. Newman's self-defence is a long, windy rebuttal, another
example of all that Arnold had censured in the translation itself. The following cut version
omits much of Newman's elaborate defence, but it retains his essential argument. Arnold
replied to Newman in 'On Translating Homer: Last Words'

Who is Homer?

Homer, (flourished 9th or 8th century BCE?, Ionia? [now in Turkey]),

presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Although these two great epic poems of ancient Greece have always been
attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the
fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to
the poems. That there was an epic poet called Homer and that he played the
primary part in shaping the Iliad and the Odyssey—so much may be said to be
probable. If this assumption is accepted, then Homer must assuredly be one of
the greatest of the world’s literary artists.
He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two
epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the
Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time
of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the
medium of Virgil’s Aeneid (which was loosely molded after the patterns of
the Iliad and the Odyssey), directly through their revival
under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century CE onward, and
subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fled
westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact on
the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations
has helped to make them the most important poems of the Classical European
tradition.