In fact English poets were less “in want” of hexameter than Arnold implied; he was more interested in telling them what kind of hexameter they would, or should, want. If anything, there were already too many English hexameters circulating in nineteenth-century England. In George Saintsbury's History of English Prosody, for example, we find an entire chapter dedicated to “The Later English Hexameter and Discussions On It.” Surveying the“battle of the hexameter” that dominated Victorian metrical theory, Saintsbury called it “the hexameter mania.”6 Within this unruly proliferation of hexameters, Arnold's call for new translations of Homer was an attempt to regulate the form of English hexameter, and transform it into an ordering principle for modern poetry. The rapid movement of Homeric hexameter, as Arnold understood it, would thus be“translated” into an English meter commensurate with modern times, not as nostalgia for the time of the ancients but as a way of comprehending the temporality of modernity and the modern nation.
In the decade immediately following Arnold’s Lectures on Translating Homer, there was a proliferation of English hexameter translations. Although these Victorian experiments in metrical translation may seem antiquated to us now—a dead end for modern prosody—nevertheless it is worth exhuming some of the hexameter debates that proved so lively in the nineteenth century. Victorian hexameters often sound like a failure, enforcing an awkward pronunciation. This
awkwardness is inscribed in the subtitle of my essay, which might be scanned as a line in hexameter as follows:
/ / | / x x| / / | |/ x x| / x x | /x x
Nineteenth-century Homers and the Hexameter Mania
With a caesura after the third foot (where it never should fall) and a final foot that is not quite a spondee (unless “mania” is elided into two syllables), this line falls short of an ideal hexameter. Its movement is interrupted: the first three feet seem to limp along lamely in spondee, dactyl, spondee, and the last three feet gather dactylic momentum only if we stress “and”: “nineteenth-century Homers AND the hexameter mania.” Nevertheless I wish to stress the conjunction, not only to make the line scan but to mark a link between Victorian versions of Homer and the development of English hexameter. Instead of stressing what is lost in translation, we might see what is gained through metrical translation as a reversal of the relation between form and content: what is translated is not a “content” but the performance of form itself, and the possibility of its transformation.
These Victorian hexameter translations have been mostly forgotten, amidst the many versions of Homer circulating in England by the end of the nineteenth century. However in The Translator's Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti argues that the Arnoldian approach to translating Homer has continued well into the twentieth century, demonstrating “Arnold's continuing power in Anglo-American literary culture” and “the dominant tradition of English-language translation, fluent domestication.”Arnold's “domesticating method,” as Venuti defines it, was “to produce familiar, fluent verse that respected bourgeois moral values”for the English nation, in contrast to the “foreignizing method” of Newman, who translated Homer into an archaic ballad form that Venuti associates with a more popular and democratic concept of English culture (130–31). Venuti's chapter on “Nation” focuses on these different ideologies of translation in the Arnold Newman debate and, according to Venuti, Arnold “won”: the idea of Homer in Arnold’s lectures served to consolidate a national ideal, enforced by a strategy of translation that sought to domesticate the foreign text. But while Venuti argues for the importance of making the material and historical conditions of translation visible, the material and historical form of hexameter translations remains invisible in his argument; he does not read the form itself to make its strangeness visible. Within the context of nineteenth-century hexameter debates it is difficult to read Arnold's call for hexameter translations simply as a triumph of fluent domestication. Although Arnold admired the rapid flow of Homer, the work of translation that Arnold prescribed to invent “such an instrument as the hexameter” was slow, laborious, and strange; even while familiarizing the English ear, hexameter was also an instrument of defamiliarization, and anything but
transparent.
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