The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

62 The Translator’s Invisibility
natural. Denham’s great achievement, in his translations as well as his
poems, was to make the heroic couplet seem natural to his successors,
thus developing a form that would dominate English poetry and
poetry translation for more than a century.
Later writers like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson recognized that
the truly “new” thing in Denham was the stylistic refinement of his
verse. They were fond of quoting Denham’s lines on the Thames in
Coopers Hill and commenting on their beauty, always formulated as
prosodic smoothness, what Dryden in the “Dedication of the Æneis”
(1697) called their “sweetness” (Dryden 1958:1047). 7 And both Dryden
and Johnson saw Denham as an innovator in translation: they were
fond of quoting his commendatory verses to Fanshawe’s Il Pastor Fido,
singling out for praise the lines where Denham advocated the free
method:
That servile path, thou nobly do’st decline,
Of tracing word by word and Line by Line;
A new and nobler way thou do’st pursue,
To make Translations, and Translators too:
They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame,
True to his Sence, but truer to his Fame.
(Denham 1969:ll. 15–16, 21–24)
Dryden joined Denham in opposing “a servile, literal Translation”
because, he noted in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), such
translation is not fluent: “either perspicuity or gracefulness will
frequently be wanting” (Dryden 1956:116).
Dryden also followed Denham, most importantly, in seeing the
couplet as an appropriate vehicle for transparent discourse. In the
preface to his play The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden asserted that Coopers
Hill, “for the majesty of the style is and ever will be, the exact standard
of good writing” and then proceeded to argue that rhyme does not
necessarily inject a note of artificiality to impede transparency (Dryden
1962:7). Any noticeably artificial use of rhyme rather shows the writer’s
lack of skill:
This is that which makes them say rhyme is not natural, it being
only so when the poet either makes a vicious choice of words, or
places them for rhyme sake, so unnaturally as no man would in
ordinary speaking; but when ’tis so judiciously ordered that the first
word in the verse seems to beget the second, and that the next […]