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Canon 67ancient text in line with literary standards prevailing in HanoverianBritain.During this crucial moment in its cultural rise, domesticatingtranslation was sometimes taken to extremes that look at once oddlycomical and rather familiar in their logic, practices a translator mightuse today in the continuing dominion of fluency. William Guthrie, forinstance, in the preface to his version of The Orations of Marcus TalliusCicero (1741), argued that “it is living Manners alone that cancommunicate the Spirit of an Original” and so it is sufficient if thetranslator has madeit his Business to be as conversant as he cou’d in that Study andManner which comes the nearest to what we may suppose hisAuthor, were he now to live, wou’d pursue, and in which he wou’dshine.(Steiner 1975:98)This was Guthrie’s reason for casting his Cicero as a member ofParliament, “where,” he says, “by a constant Attendance, in which Iwas indulg’d for several Years, I endeavour’d to possess my self of theLanguage most proper for this translation” (ibid.:99). Guthrie’stranslation naturalized the Latin text with the transparent discourse hedeveloped as a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Gentleman’sMagazine.It is important not to view such instances of domestication assimply inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy and fidelity arealways locally defined, specific to different cultural formations atdifferent historical moments. Both Denham and Drydenrecognized that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs in thetranslation process and situates the translation in an equivocalrelationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, alwayssomewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and asupplement. Yet they also viewed their domesticating method asthe most effective way to control this equivocal relationship andproduce versions adequate to the Latin text. As a result, theycastigated methods that either rigorously adhered to sourcelanguagetextual features or played fast and loose with them inways that they were unwilling to license, that insufficientlyadhered to the canon of fluency in translation. Dryden “thought itfit to steer betwixt the two Extreams, of Paraphrase, and literalTranslation” (Dryden 1958:1055), i.e., between the aim of