" On Tranzlaytin Howmer " : The Iliad in Birmingham hexameters – domesticating foreignization in non-standard verse translation

Résumé En

This paper examines how a ‘Birmingham’ version of Homer’s Iliad – one composed in a Brummie dialect and, ironically, ‘a cheap, showy, imitation’ – challenges the terms of Lawrence Venuti’s valuable distinction between domesticating and foreignizing translation strategies. In particular, by employing Matthew Arnold’s imitation of Greek hexameter (another Brummagem element), which Yopie Prins calls ‘an instrument of defamiliarization’, the offered translations reveal how wrong Venuti was to use Arnold’s undeniable elitism as a pretext for entirely dismissing his foreignizing credentials. Perhaps Venuti’s oversight is to be expected; the Iliad has long been a locus for the confusion of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the authentic and the inauthentic, the noble and the ignoble, the poetic and the unpoetic. Dialect translation merely magnifies this ambivalence. Meanwhile, the ideological prejudices behind the supposedly æsthetic rejection of a language variety spoken by the urban, industrial, working-class as a medium for epic poetry are besieged, like the walls of Troy.