It isn't only the author, of course, who needs protection. Translators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century regularly suggest that they are sparing their readers material or language that would be shocking (or repulsive, or distasteful) to the translators' contemporaries. And behind this concern with offensiveness there sometimes lurks another concern (reflected in some of the defences I cited earlier: it's good clean fun, it has a high moral purpose) that the audience might be not only shocked but morally corrupted by these texts. 

This concern is often made explicit in the legal rulings against obscenity and in attacks against obscene literature (including translations of classical texts) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by organizations such as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. A series of articles in the New York Times makes clear that the possible impact on inappropriate readers--and the resulting impact on society as a whole--was a central issue in the 1922 prosecution of the publishing firm Boni and Liveright for the limited edition publication of W. C. Firebaugh's translation of Petronius' Satyricon. At the time when these articles appeared, the suit had failed, largely because the presiding magistrate saw the Satyricon as defended by its status as a classic. This status was understood to be supported by evidence of scholarly work on the text, a text significant not only because of its influence on the later literary tradition and its usefulness as a source of information on the ancient world, but also because its antiquity makes clear that its customs are not ours.

In the face of a second possible suit, Boni & Liveright (who had meanwhile filed a countersuit for libel) argued both that the text was a classic and that the fact that it had been published in a limited edition (at the then quite steep price of $20) meant that Firebaugh's translation was available only to 'a select clientele of mature and incorruptible persons'. But John Sumner of the Vice Society had pointed out that the publishers were offering the book in batches of fifty at a reduced price to other booksellers, and that when he sent someone to buy the book, that person's business 'card was accepted as sufficient evidence of his high moral and intellectual caliber and the only question asked was whether he had $20'. What follows makes clear that the fact of the work's being a translation was of particular significance, since Sumner further asserted that: 'Petronius is now to be found in the original Latin in the libraries under lock and key where it can be obtained by bona fide scholars and research workers. It is in difficult Latin and automatically restricts its readers to about one in ten thousand or one in a hundred thousand.' Thus, in spite of the fact that (for Sumner) there was 'no vicious or perverse idea or action as well as hardly any filthy word in our language, which this book does not contain', it was the book's accessibility in translation that was the real cause for alarm:

The publication of this book in English is an entering wedge for the publication of many volumes which have been uniformly banned in this country.... If the Satyricon while in Latin form could be responsible for the Seeley dinner (the occasion of a notorious society scandal featuring the 'exotic dancer' known as Little Egypt), what effect can be expected from putting translations into the hand of whomever (sic) will buy it? 

Sumner's words reflect a concern that obscenity in translations of classical texts will not only shock but corrupt the reader, and that this corruption will have a broad effect on society. In particular, Sumner fears that the Satyricon will fall into the hands of people who are immature, who are not of high moral or intellectual calibre, and who are not 'bona fide scholars and research workers'. 

In 'Legislating Morality: Victorian and Modern Legal Responses to Pornography', Tom Lewis comments on the problem the Victorian courts faced in distinguishing between works of high art and classic literature (which were beneficial and uplifting) and obscenity (which was depraving and corrupting)'. He also notes that the central concern of those seeking to legislate on such issues was 'not the existence or consumption of obscene materials per se' but their availability 'to a much wider reading and viewing public'. 'It was all very well... for the middle class man to indulge himself with expensive works of erotica in the privacy of his study. It was quite another for cheaper milder forms to be visible openly in the public streets, or to fall into the hands of women and children within the sanctity of the home itself.' In Sumner's pronouncements, fears about the role of translation in corrupting the general population and effacing any proper distinction between private and public and between different classes of reader work to deprive the classic of any privileged status. For translators of the classics, however, that status is a given, and it is precisely the privileged status of the classic that conditions these translators' response to issues of class in their readership and in the diction they adopt.

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