The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Canon 63
it must then be granted, rhyme has all the advantages of prose
besides its own. […] where the poet commonly confines his sense to
his couplet, [he] must contrive that sense into such words that the
rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme.
(Dryden 1962:8)
Denham’s work was canonized by later writers because his use of the
couplet made his poetry and poetry translations read “naturally and
easily” and therefore seem “majestic,” in an appropriately royal
metaphor, or “more right,” more accurate or faithful as translations—
but only because the illusion of transparency concealed the process of
naturalizing the foreign text in an English cultural and social
situation. The ascendancy of the heroic couplet from the late
seventeenth century on has frequently been explained in political
terms, wherein the couplet is viewed as a cultural form whose marked
sense of antithesis and closure reflects a political conservatism,
support for the restored monarchy and for aristocratic domination—
despite the continuing class divisions that had erupted in civil wars
and fragmented the aristocracy into factions, some more accepting of
bourgeois social practices than others. Robin Grove is particularly
sensitive to the social implications of the discursive “flow” sought by
the writers who championed the couplet: “The urbanity of the style,”
he observed,
incorporates the reader as a member of the urbanely-responsive
class. […] literature announces itself as a social act, even as the
‘society’ it conjures around it is an increasingly specialized/
stratified fiction: a fiction which indeed relates to historical fact
(provided we don’t just coagulate the two), but for whose purposes
the ideas of Sense, Ease, Naturalness (cf. An Essay on Criticism, 68–
140) contained a rich alluvial deposit of aspirations and meanings
largely hidden from view.
(Grove 1984:54) 8
The fact that for us today no form better than the couplet epitomizes
the artificial use of language bears witness, not just to how deeply
transparency was engrained in aristocratic literary culture, but also to
how much it could conceal.
It is Dryden in particular who found Denham’s translation of Virgil
so important for the rise of this cultural discourse. In the “Dedication
of the Æneis,” he stated that “’tis the utmost of my Ambition to be