The Translator’s Invisibility

that it is quite impossible to read his verses without regretting that he happened to be an idler, a man of fashion, and a debauchee. […] he might have bequeathed to posterity works fitted to inspire sentiments of virtue and morality, instead of a book, the greater part of which must for ever remain sealed to all those who have any principle of human delicacy in their composition.

(ibid.:489)

The translators of the first book-length versions of Catullus, Nott and Lamb, shared the prevailing assessment of the Latin poet, but it shaped their work very differently. Nott too thought that “strength and simplicity, elegance and perspicuity mark the stile of Catullus” (Nott 1795:I, xxiii), while Lamb wrote of “the poet’s natural felicity of expression,” “the same natural tone which Catullus rarely or rather never lost” (Lamb 1821:I, xl, xlii). The most remarkable difference between the translators occurred on the question of morality: Nott sought to reproduce the pagan sexuality and physically coarse language of the Latin text, whereas Lamb minimized or just omitted them.

Nott was aware that “Those indecencies occurring so frequently in our poet, which I have constantly preserved in the original, and ventured in some way to translate, may be thought to require apology” (Nott 1795:I, x). His initial reason—to satisfy “the inquisitive scholar [who] might wish to be acquainted with the ribaldry, and gross {85} lampoon of Roman times” (ibid.)—would not be persuasive to his contemporaries, since such a reader already had access to the Latin text; perhaps the claim should be viewed less as a rationale than as a reflection of Nott’s own scholarly bent, his wish to address an academic audience. His main concern seems to have been twofold: to ward against an ethnocentric response to the Latin text and preserve its historical and cultural difference:

When an ancient classic is translated, and explained, the work may be considered as forming a link in the chain of history: history should not be falsified, we ought therefore to translate him fairly; and when he gives us the manners of his own day, however disgusting to our sensations, and repugnant to our natures they may sometimes prove, we must not endeavour to conceal, or gloss them over, through a fastidious regard to delicacy.

(ibid.:x–xi)

Nott’s sense of historical accuracy assumed a mimetic concept of translation as a representation adequate to the foreign text. In 1795, this mimetic assumption was beginning to seem dated in English poetic theory, a throwback to an older empiricism, challenged now by expressive theories of poetry and original genius.[14] And yet Nott’s adherence to a residual theoretical assumption enabled him to resist the pressure of bourgeois moral values on his translation.