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.
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 {64} thought [the] Equal” of Caroline translators like “Sir John Denham, Mr Waller, and Mr Cowley” (Dryden 1958:1051). He admired Denham’s version of Book II so much that he absorbed no fewer than eighty lines of it in his own version of the Aeneid. A typical example is his rendering of the account of Priam’s death, where, as Dryden acknowledged in a footnote, Denham’s climactic line is repeated:
Dryden’s dedicatory essay makes clear his advocacy of Denham’s free translation method, which he similarly asserts with nationalistic pronouncements (“I will boldly own, that this English Translation has more of Virgil’s Spirit in it, than either the French, or the Italian” (ibid.:1051)) while finally confessing its likeness to French models:
I may presume to say, and I hope with as much reason as the French Translator, that taking all the Materials of this divine Author, I have endeavour’d to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age. I acknowledge, with Segrais, that I have not succeeded in this attempt, according to my desire: yet I shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I may be allow’d to have copied the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence of his Stile.
As with Denham, the domestication of Dryden’s translation method is so complete that fluency is seen to be a feature of Virgil’s poetry instead of the discursive strategy implemented by the translator to make the heroic couplet seem transparent, indistinguishable from “the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence of his Stile.” And, much more explicitly than Denham, Dryden links his fluent, domesticating translation to aristocratic culture. Thus, he explains his avoidance of specialized terminology in his version of the Aeneid—“the {65} proper terms of Navigation, Land-Service, or […] the Cant of any Profession”—by arguing that
Virgil has avoided those proprieties, because he Writ not to Mariners, Souldiers, Astronomers, Gardners, Peasants, but to all in general, and in particular to Men and Ladies of the first Quality: who have been better Bred than to be too nicely knowing in the Terms. In such cases, ’tis enough for a Poet to write so plainly, that he may be understood by his Readers.
Dryden’s remark is a reminder that the free translation method was modelled on poetry, that Denham was using translation to distinguish a literary elite from “them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith” (Denham 1656:A3r), and that this valorization of the literary contributed to the concealment of the cultural and social conditions of translation, including Dryden’s own. For, as Steven Zwicker has shown, Dryden also designed his Virgil to intervene into a specific political struggle: it “is a meditation on the language and culture of Virgil’s poetry, but it is also a set of reflections on English politics in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution,” argued Zwicker, “a time when William III’s reign was not fixed with the certainty it assumed late in the decade, a time when Stuart restoration might still be contemplated, and not wholly as fantasy” (Zwicker 1984:177). The triumph of the heroic couplet in late seventeenth-century poetic discourse depends to some extent on the triumph of a neoclassical translation method in aristocratic literary culture, a method whose greatest triumph is perhaps the discursive sleight of hand that masks the political interests it serves.
In Dryden’s wake, from Alexander Pope’s multi-volume Homer (1715–1726) to Alexander Tytler’s systematic Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), domestication dominated the theory and practice of English-language translation in every genre, prose as well as poetry. It was allied to different social tendencies and made to support varying cultural and political functions. Pope’s Homer continued the refinement of a transparent poetic discourse in the heroic couplet, still a literary elitism among the hegemonic classes, dependent less on court patronage than on publishers with subscription lists that were {66} now increasingly bourgeois as well as aristocratic. It became fashionable to subscribe to Pope’s translation: over 40 percent of the names on the lists for his Iliad were titled, and the MPs included both Tories and Whigs.[9] Fluent translating remained affiliated with the British cultural elite, and its authority was so powerful that it could cross party lines. Pope described the privileged discourse in his preface:
[8]
Historical explanations of the heroic couplet that stress its political function are offered, for example, by Caudwell 1973:99, 135, Korshin 1973, and Easthope 1983:119. John Milton may have set forth the first political reading of the heroic couplet when, in the prefatory statement to
[9]
The subscription lists for Pope’s Homer are discussed by Rogers 1978, Hodgart 1978, and Speck 1982. Hodgart observes that the list for the