many (no doubt) will say, Horace is by mee forsaken, his Lyrick softnesse, and emphaticall Muse maymed: That in all there is a generall defection from his genuine Harmony. Those I must tell, I haue in this translation, rather sought his Spirit, then Numbers; yet the Musique of Verse not neglected neither.
In a 1628 version of Virgil’s eclogues that imposed a courtly aesthetic on the Latin text, “W.L., Gent.” felt compelled to justify his departures with a similar apology:
{47} Some Readers I make no doubt they wil meet with in these dainty mouth’d times, that will taxe them, for not comming resolved word for word, and line for line with the Author […] I used the freedome of a Translator, not tying myselfe to the tyranny of a Grammatical construction, but breaking the shell into many peeces, was only carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation.
As early as 1616, Barten Holyday, who became chaplain to Charles I and was created doctor of divinity at the king’s order, introduced his translation of Persius by announcing that “I haue not herein bound my selfe with a ferularie superstition to the letter: but with the ancient libertie of a Translator, haue vsed a moderate paraphrase, where the obscuritie did more require it” (Holyday 1635:A5r–A5v; DNB). Holyday articulated the opposition to the grammarians that Denham would later join, and with a similarly Latinate tag, calling close translation “a ferularie superstition,” belief propagated with the rod (ferula), school discipline—a joke designed especially for a grammarian.
In 1620, Sir Thomas Wroth, a member of the Somerset gentry who affected the literary pursuits of a courtly amateur (he called his epigrams The Abortive of an Idle Houre), anticipated Denham in several respects (DNB). Wroth likewise chose to translate the second book of the Aeneid and to call it The Destruction of Troy, but he also defined his translatorly “freedome” in “A Reqvest to the Reader”:
Giue not vp your casting verdict rashly, though you find mee sometimes wandring (which I purposely do) out of the visible bounds, but deliberately take notice that I stray not from the scope and intent of the Author, iustified by the best Commentaries: and so I leaue you to reade, to vnderstand, and to encrease.
Wroth’s freer method ultimately rested on a scholarly rationale (“Commentaries”) reminiscent of Jonson’s neoclassicism. And indeed Wroth’s farewell to the reader (“to reade, to vnderstand, and to encrease”) echoed the exhortation with which Jonson opened his Epigrammes (1616): “Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my booke in hand, / To reade it welclass="underline" that is, to understand” (Jonson 1968:4). In 1634, Sir Robert Stapylton, a gentleman in ordinary of the privy chamber to the Prince of Wales, published a version of Book Four of the Aeneid in {48} which he anticipated Denham both by questioning any close translation of poetry and by assigning the freer method the same class affiliation:
It is true that wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfused into another without losse of spirits: yet I presume such graces are retained, as those of the Noblest quality will favour this Translation, from an Original, that was sometimes the unenvied Favourite of the greatest Roman Emperour
Denham consolidated the several-decades-long emergence of a neoclassical translation method in aristocratic literary culture. It may have seemed “new” to him, not because it did not have any previous advocates, but because it did: it was a modern revival of an ancient cultural practice, making Denham’s translation a simulacral “Copy” of Virgil’s true “Original,” rationalized with a Platonic theory of translation as the copy of a copy of the truth: “I have made it my principal care to follow him, as he made it his to follow Nature in all his proportions” (Denham 1656:A3v). But Denham’s sense of his own modernity was less philosophical than political, linked to a specific class and nation. Coming back from exile in France, he may have found his translation method “new” in the sense of foreign, in fact French. French translation in the 1640s was characterized by theories and practices advocating free translation of classical texts, and Denham, among such other exiled royalist writers as Abraham Cowley and Sir Richard Fanshawe, was no doubt acquainted with the work of its leading French proponent, Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, a prolific translator of Greek and Latin.[2] D’Ablancourt’s freedom with Tacitus set the standard. In his preface to his version of the Annals, he wrote that
la diversité qui se trouve dans les langues est si grande, tant pour la construction et la forme des périodes, que pour les figures et les autres 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 des traductions ordinaires, qui sont ou mortes et languissantes, ou confuses, et embroüillées, sans aucun ordre ny agréement.
the diversity that one finds among languages is so great, in the arrangement and shape of the periods, as in the figures and other ornaments, that it is always necessary to change the air and {49} appearance, unless one wishes to create a monstrous body, like those in ordinary translations, which are either dead or languishing, or obscure, and muddled, without any order or gracefulness.
Compare Denham’s preface: “Poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum” (Denham 1656:A3 r ). Denham echoed D’Ablancourt’s body/soul metaphor, although following Stapylton’s example (“wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfused into another without losse of spirits”) he imagined translation alchemically, as a distillation in which the residue was termed a caput mortuum (OED; Hermans 1985:122). The alchemical image indicated that a free translation effected a radical change, in which what “was borne a Forraigner” can now be “esteeme[d] as a Native”—or, in this case, English (Stapylton 1634:A2 r).
The “new spirit” that is “added” with this translation method involves a process of domestication, in which the foreign text is imprinted with values specific to the target-language culture. D’Ablancourt called it “changer d’air et de visage.” The elliptical, discontinuous discourse of Tacitus must be translated
sans choquer les delicatesses de nostre langue & la justesse du raisonnement. […] Souvent on est contraint d’adjoûter quelque chose à sa pensée pour l’éclaircir; quelquefois il en faut retrancher une partie pour donner jour à tout le reste.
[2]
For the cultural activities of exiled royalist writers, see Hardacre 1953. Steiner 1975:13–25 considers the French influence on their translations. Zuber 1968 shows the importance of D’Ablancourt to the French translation tradition.