Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and romantic (in)visibility

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Romantic period redefined translation in a way that is epochal; that is, its reconfiguration of translation betokened a shift from the early modern period to a fully experienced modernity. In British Romanticism, in particular, this redefinition paradoxically combines a marginalisation and a celebration of translation. This article examines this paradox and shows that even as many British Romantic writers rhetorically carved out a space for their literary authority by arguing for the fundamental untranslatability of literature, there is also a discursive strand that embraces translation. Through a reading of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, an 1816 sonnet by John Keats, which this article proposes to read as a poetical piece of translation history which fuses early modern translatio and modern translation, we show that these strands combine to create a poetically and historiographically potent way of imagining the reliance on international traffic and mediation which characterise modern literature.