Newman and Arnold

Venuti gives another example of the foreignizing strategy in an Englishman of the 19th century, which is Francis Newman (1805 – 1897). Newman was the brother of the famous educationist Cardinal Newman, and was a classical scholar. As a translator he challenged the fluency concept in English translation, and was one of the first among the Victorians to advocate foreignizing in translation. Newman was essentially a rebel who did not subscribe to many of the prevailing beliefs of his day. He advocated women’s suffrage, abolition of slavery, decentralized government, and criticized colonialism. He was a liberalist and this was reflected in his translation projects as well. His translations, unlike Schleiermacher’s, were meant for the ordinary person who was not a classical scholar. But Newman advocated a translation method that would assert the differences between the source and target language texts, preferring a style that would reflect the archaism , if any, of the source text and went against the concept of fluency. But he was not concerned about historical accuracy in the matter of recreating the archaic style, which resulted in an “artificially constructed archaism” (123).

Predictably, reviewers were not happy with Newman’s translations, mainly because they felt that they were “un-English” (127). They felt it made too many demands on the ordinary reader who was used to the English traditions of writing. The person who was very unhappy about Newman’s technique was Matthew Arnold the poet and critic. He attacked Newman’s translation of the Iliad in a lecture series delivered in 1861, titled "On Translating Homer". Arnold did not agree with Newman’s principles at all. He wanted “translation to transcend, rather than signify, linguistic and cultural differences, and so he prized the illusionism of transparent discourse…” (129). He was of the view that there should be complete identification with the original text, and that the translator should not allow the current English methods to defile Homer. Venuti underlines the Christian Platonic metaphysics of Arnold who believed in complete semantic equivalence. Arnold felt that only those who were scholars in Greek literature were qualified to comment upon the worth of a translation of Homer, and objected to the ballad metre used by Newman for his translation. Arnold comes across as an academic who was opposed to populism of any sort. This is not surprising because Arnold was in favour of ‘high culture’ as opposed to what he described as English philistinism.In some ways Arnold resembles Schleiermacher who wished to build up an elitist culture in Germany through foreignizing translations. Venuti observes: “Translation for Arnold was a means to empower an academic elite, to endow it with national cultural authority, but this empowerment involved an imposition of scholarly values on other cultural constituencies – including the diverse English-reading audience that Newman hoped to reach” (132). Venuti interprets Arnold’s opposition to Newman as “an academic repression of popular cultural forms that was grounded in a competing reading of Homer” (132).