Note 11 — PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION OF OVID'S EPISTLES.[2]

Cowley is now so undeservedly forgotten, that it is not superfluous to insert his own excellent account of the free mode of translation, prefixed to his translations from Pindar. "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another; as may appear, when he that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving. And sure rhyme, without the addition of wit, and the spirit of poetry, (quod nequeo monstrare et sentio tantum,) would but make it ten times more distracted than it is in prose. We must consider, in Pindar, the great difference of time betwixt his age and ours, which changes, as in pictures, at least the colours of poetry; the no less difference betwixt the religions and customs of our countries, and a thousand particularities of places, persons, and manners, which do but confusedly appear to our eyes at so great a distance; and, lastly, (which were enough, alone, for my purpose,) we must consider, that our ears are strangers to the music of his numbers, which sometimes, (especially in songs and odes,) almost without any thing else, makes an excellent poet. For though the grammarians and critics have laboured to reduce his verses into regular feet and measures, (as they have also those of the Greek and Latin comedies,) yet, in effect, they are little better than prose to our ears: and I would gladly know what applause our best pieces of English poesy could expect from a Frenchman or Italian, if converted faithfully, and word for word, into French or Italian prose. And when we have considered all this, we must needs confess, that after all these losses sustained by Pindar, all we can add to him by our wit and invention, (not deserting still his subject,) is not like to make him a richer man than he was in his own country. This is, in some measure, to be applied to all translations; and the not observing of it is the cause, that all which ever I yet saw are so much inferior to their originals. The like happens, too, in pictures, from the same root of exact imitation; which being a vile and unworthy kind of servitude, is incapable of producing any thing good or noble. I have seen originals, both in painting and poesy, much more beautiful than their natural objects; but I never saw a copy better than the original: which indeed cannot be otherwise; for men resolving in no case to shoot beyond the mark, it is a thousand to one if they shoot not short of it. It does not at all trouble me, that the grammarians, perhaps, will not suffer this libertine way of rendering foreign authors to be called translation; for I am not so much enamoured of the name translator, as not to wish rather to be something better, though it wants yet a name. I speak not so much all this in defence of my manner of translating or imitating, (or what other title they please,) the two ensuing odes of Pindar; for that would not deserve half these words, as by this occasion to rectify the opinion of divers men upon this matter."