Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

The 17
th
 Century 
Translation of the classic s increased considerably in France between 1625 and 1660, 
the great age of French classicism and of the flowering of French theatre based on the 
Aristotelian unitizes. French writers and theorists were in turn enthusiastically translated into 
English. 
The emphasis on rules and models in Augustan England did not mean, however, that 
art was perceived as a merely imitative skill. Sir John Denham (1615-69), whose theory of 
translation, as expressed in his poem. To Sir Richard Fanshawe upon his Translation of 
Pastor Fido’(16-48) and in his Preface to his translation of The Destruction of Troy (1656) 
(see below) covers both the formal aspect (Art) and the spirit (Nature) of the work, but warns 
against applying the principle of literal translation to the translation of poetry. 

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Denham argues for a concept of translation that sees translator and original writer as 
equals but operating in clearly differentiated social and temporal contexts. He sees it as the 
translator’s duty to his source text to extract what he perceives as the essential core of the 
work and to reproduce or recreate the work in the target language. 
Abraham Cowley (1618-67) goes a stage further, and in his ‘Preface’ to his 
Pindarique Odes (1656) he boldly asserts that he has ‘taken, left out and added what I please’ 
in his translations, aiming no so much at letting the reader know precisely what the original 
author said as ‘what was his way and manner of speaking’. 
John Dryden (1631-1700), in his important Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), tackled 
the problems of translations by formulating three basic types: 
1.
Metapharase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line from one language 
into another. 
2.
Paraphrase, or translation with latitude, the Ciceronian ‘sense-for-sense’ view of 
translation. 
3.
Imitation, where the translator can abandon the text of the original as he sees fit. 
Of these types Dryden chooses the second as the more balanced path, provided the 
translator fulfils certain criteria; to translate poetry, he argues, the translator must be a poet, 
must be a master of both languages, and must understand both the characteristics and ‘spirit’ 
of the original author, besides conforming to the aesthetic canons of his own age. 
Dryden’s views on translation were followed fairly closely by Alexander Pope (1688-
1744), who advocates the same middle ground as Dryden, with stress on close reading of the 
original to not the details of style and manner whilst endeavoring to keep alive the ‘fire’ of 
the poem.