The Translator’s Invisibility

Dryden also followed Denham, most importantly, in seeing the couplet as an appropriate vehicle for transparent discourse. In the preface to his play The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden asserted that Coopers Hill, “for the majesty of the style is and ever will be, the exact standard of good writing” and then proceeded to argue that rhyme does not necessarily inject a note of artificiality to impede transparency (Dryden 1962:7). Any noticeably artificial use of rhyme rather shows the writer’s lack of skill:

This is that which makes them say rhyme is not natural, it being only so when the poet either makes a vicious choice of words, or places them for rhyme sake, so unnaturally as no man would in ordinary speaking; but when ’tis so judiciously ordered that the first word in the verse seems to beget the second, and that the next […] {63} it must then be granted, rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. […] where the poet commonly confines his sense to his couplet, [he] must contrive that sense into such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme.

(Dryden 1962:8)

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.

(Grove 1984:54)[8]

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: