We all bid then translate it the old way
Not a-la-mode, but like George Sandys or May;
Show Virgil's every period, not steal sense
To make up a new-fashioned poem thence.
Other translators, though not defending the literal method, do not advocate imitation. Roscommon, in the Essay on Translated Verse, demands fidelity to the substance of the original when he says,
The genuine sense, intelligibly told,
Shows a translator both discreet and bold.
Excursions are inexpiably bad,
And 'tis much safer to leave out than add,
but, unlike Phaer, he forbids the omission of difficult passages:
Abstruse and mystic thoughts you must express,
With painful care and seeming easiness.
Dryden considers the whole situation in detail.[404] He admires Cowley's Pindaric Odes and admits that both Pindar and his translator do not come under ordinary rules, but he fears the effect of Cowley's example "when writers of unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an undertaking," and believes that only a poet so "wild and ungovernable" as Pindar justifies the method of Cowley. "If Virgil, or Ovid, or any regular intelligible authors be thus used, 'tis no longer to be called their work, when neither the thoughts nor words are drawn from the original; but instead of them there is something new produced, which is almost the creation of another hand.... He who is inquisitive to know an author's thoughts will be disappointed in his expectation; and 'tis not always that a man will be contented to have a present made him, when he expects the payment of a debt. To state it fairly; imitation is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead."
Though imitation was not generally accepted as a standard method of translation, certain elements in the theory of Denham and Cowley remained popular throughout the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. A favorite comment in the complimentary verses attached to translations is the assertion that the translator has not only equaled but surpassed his original. An extreme example of this is Dryden's fatuous reference to the Earl of Mulgrave's translation of Ovid:
How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear
His fame augmented by an English peer,
How he embellishes his Helen's loves,
Outdoes his softness, and his sense improves.[405]
His earlier lines to Sir Robert Howard on the latter's translation of the Achilleis of Statius are somewhat less bald:
To understand how much we owe to you,
We must your numbers with your author's view;
Then shall we see his work was lamely rough,
Each figure stiff as if designed in buff;
His colours laid so thick on every place,
As only showed the paint, but hid the face;
But as in perspective we beauties see
Which in the glass, not in the picture be,
So here our sight obligingly mistakes
That wealth which his your bounty only makes.
Thus vulgar dishes are by cooks disguised,
More for their dressing than their substance prized.[406]