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62 The Translator’s Invisibilitynatural. Denham’s great achievement, in his translations as well as hispoems, was to make the heroic couplet seem natural to his successors,thus developing a form that would dominate English poetry andpoetry translation for more than a century.Later writers like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson recognized thatthe truly “new” thing in Denham was the stylistic refinement of hisverse. They were fond of quoting Denham’s lines on the Thames inCoopers Hill and commenting on their beauty, always formulated asprosodic smoothness, what Dryden in the “Dedication of the Æneis”(1697) called their “sweetness” (Dryden 1958:1047). 7 And both Drydenand Johnson saw Denham as an innovator in translation: they werefond of quoting his commendatory verses to Fanshawe’s Il Pastor Fido,singling out for praise the lines where Denham advocated the freemethod: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), suchtranslation is not fluent: “either perspicuity or gracefulness willfrequently be wanting” (Dryden 1956:116).Dryden also followed Denham, most importantly, in seeing thecouplet as an appropriate vehicle for transparent discourse. In thepreface to his play The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden asserted that CoopersHill, “for the majesty of the style is and ever will be, the exact standardof good writing” and then proceeded to argue that rhyme does notnecessarily inject a note of artificiality to impede transparency (Dryden1962:7). Any noticeably artificial use of rhyme rather shows the writer’slack of skill:This is that which makes them say rhyme is not natural, it beingonly so when the poet either makes a vicious choice of words, orplaces them for rhyme sake, so unnaturally as no man would inordinary speaking; but when ’tis so judiciously ordered that the firstword in the verse seems to beget the second, and that the next […]