Repository path: workshop/regimes/R13-newman-1856.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R13 — Newman 1856/1861 (retain every peculiarity, executed)

v1.0 (frozen 2026-08-02, S093.) The mirror of R12, assembled from Francis W. Newman's preface to his Iliad (1856) as Arnold quotes it and as Newman restates it, and from Newman's Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice (1861), read complete in the original this session (S-arnold-newman-homer).

Newman is the one subject on this project's shelf who published a first-person manifesto about the book he translated and then defended it in print against a named attack. R08 had to be assembled from a theorist's account of his own practice; R13 is assembled from a translator's account of a translation the project has already measured (A-homer-sarpedon, RS-20260802b). That measurement found Newman taking the domesticating option at a quarter to a half of 21 sites in one speech — so R13 is a rule set its own author did not consistently follow, and that is worth knowing before it is used.

Roles, human involvement

As R07. Lead translator, labeled subject, $0. Judge never the lead.

The rule set (frozen; cited by number in the log)

N1 — Retain every peculiarity. "To retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be", so that it may "never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material." The translator's "first duty is a historical one, to be faithful."

N2 — A broad tinge of antiquity is essential. "A broad tinge of antiquity in the style is essential, to make Homer's barbaric puerilities and eccentricities less offensive." Old words are not ignoble — "in general the nobler words come from ancient style" — provided they are in keeping with the general style. There is no sharp line between the foreign and the antiquated: Scots words are admissible on the same footing as archaisms (callant, canny, bonny, skirl), because "what is obsolete with us, may still live somewhere."

N3 — Rise and sink with the subject. "Homer rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean", and the translator follows him. "No treatment can elevate the subject; the translator must not be expected to make noble what is not so intrinsically." And: "Stateliness is not Grandeur."

N4 — Compounds stay compounds; do not paraphrase an epithet. Coin where English lacks the word (fair-thron'd, rill-bestream'd, dapper-greav'd, man-ennobling): "If Shakspeare might invent the compound 'heaven-kissing', or 'man-ennobling', so might William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I." Explicitly: "to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done: to omit it entirely would be better."

N5 — Coarse physical words are epical in a primary physical sense, and forbidden in a secondary moral one. sweat, haul, plump, maul, yell, bang, splash, smash, thump, tug, scud, sprawl, spank are admitted "in their purely physical sense"; the same words as moral metaphor are refused. This is a two-sided rule and both sides bind.

N6 — Keep the uncertainty of the source. "I desired to leave in the English all the uncertainty of the Greek." Where the Greek word's sense is disputed, the English should be correspondingly open, not resolved for the reader's comfort.

N7 — Translate descriptive animal names; do not translate personal names. Xanthus → Chestnut, Balius → Spotted, Podarga → Spry-foot, because "we never call a dog Spot, unless he is spotted"; but Hector and Laomedon stay, because personal names are used "without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning."

N8 — Do not borrow another poet's coinage. A phrase that belongs to a named English poet may not be used, because it "would be felt to quote" him: Newman refuses heaven-kissing for οὐρανομήκης precisely because it is Shakespeare's.

N9 — The tribunal. "Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge." Explicitly the opposite of R12's A9.

N10 — Quaintness is not a defect to be apologised for. It is "a condition of his cardinal excellences"; the translator should "not shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek." (Newman's own footnoted revision of his more famous and weaker formula, "I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque.")

N11 — Metre. The unrhymed four-plus-three ballad line with a double (feminine) ending — Campbell's stanza with the rhyme removed. Anapaests excluded from the Iliad entirely; no i'th', o'th' elisions; polysyllables given their full syllable count. Monotony is broken by varying the caesura and the weight of the accents, not by admitting a tripping foot.

Procedure

Identical to R12's, with R12 substituted by R13, and:

• §5d — N1 sites are flagged. Where a feature of the Greek was retained because it is foreign, the log marks it N1 and names the feature.
• §5e — Sites where the rule set is silent are marked SILENT.

Known limitations (by design)

• Everything R07 and R08 list.
• N1 is unfalsifiable as stated. "Retain every peculiarity so far as he is able" cannot be violated by a translator willing to say a site defeated his ability. This is the same shape as R08's R10 and has the same consequence: an N1 coverage rate for R13 is an upper bound.
• N3 requires a judgment about the source's altitude that Arnold denies can be made at all, and the regime cannot settle that quarrel from inside.
• N2's licence to use Scots imports a second dialect's markedness on the theory that foreign and antique are interchangeable. That theory is the regime's, not the project's.
• N9 is not available to this project's jury either — its jury is neither an educated unlearned public nor a tribunal of erudition, but three language models that may be given the source or not.
• N11 will be executed imperfectly, as R12's A10 will.

Changelog

• 2026-08-02 v1.0 (frozen, S093) — created, with R12, for E-20260802g-programme-divergence.