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48 The Translator’s Invisibilitywhich he anticipated Denham both by questioning any closetranslation of poetry and by assigning the freer method the same classaffiliation:It is true that wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfusedinto another without losse of spirits: yet I presume such graces areretained, as those of the Noblest quality will favour this Translation,from an Original, that was sometimes the unenvied Favourite of thegreatest Roman Emperour(Stapylton 1634:A4 v ; DNB)Denham consolidated the several-decades-long emergence of aneoclassical translation method in aristocratic literary culture. It mayhave seemed “new” to him, not because it did not have any previousadvocates, but because it did: it was a modern revival of an ancientcultural practice, making Denham’s translation a simulacral “Copy”of Virgil’s true “Original,” rationalized with a Platonic theory oftranslation as the copy of a copy of the truth: “I have made it myprincipal care to follow him, as he made it his to follow Nature in allhis proportions” (Denham 1656:A3 v ). But Denham’s sense of his ownmodernity was less philosophical than political, linked to a specificclass and nation. Coming back from exile in France, he may havefound his translation method “new” in the sense of foreign, in factFrench. French translation in the 1640s was characterized by theoriesand practices advocating free translation of classical texts, andDenham, among such other exiled royalist writers as AbrahamCowley and Sir Richard Fanshawe, was no doubt acquainted with thework of its leading French proponent, Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, aprolific translator of Greek and Latin. 2 D’Ablancourt’s freedom withTacitus set the standard. In his preface to his version of the Annals, hewrote thatla diversité qui se trouve dans les langues est si grande, tant pourla construction et la forme des périodes, que pour les figures et lesautres ornemens, qu’il faut à tous coups changer d’air et de visage,si l’on ne veut faire un corps monstreux, tel que celuy destraductions ordinaires, qui sont ou mortes et languissantes, ouconfuses, et embroüillées, sans aucun ordre ny agréement. thediversity that one finds among languages is so great, in thearrangement and shape of the periods, as in the figures and otherornaments, that it is always necessary to change the air and