ession regarding the earlier translators. Thomas
May and George Sandys are often included in the same category. Sandys'
translation of Ovid is regarded by Dryden as typical of its time. Its
literalism, its resulting lack of poetry, "proceeded from the wrong
judgment of the age in which he lived. They neither knew good verse nor
loved it; they were scholars, 'tis true, but they were pedants; and for
all their pedantic pains, all their translations want to be translated
into English."[396]

But neither Jonson, Sandys, nor May has much to say with regard to the
proper methods of translation. The most definite utterance of the group
is found in the lines which Jonson addressed to May on his translation
of Lucan:

But who hath them interpreted, and brought
Lucan's whole frame unto us, and so wrought
As not the smallest joint or gentlest word
In the great mass or machine there is stirr'd?
The self same genius! so the world will say
The sun translated, or the son of May.[397]

May's own preface says nothing of his theories. Sandys says of his Ovid,
"To the translation I have given what perfection my pen could bestow, by
polishing, altering, or restoring the harsh, improper, or mistaken with
a nicer exactness than perhaps is required in so long a labor,"[398] a
comment open to various interpretations. His metrical version of the
Psalms is described as "paraphrastically translated," and it is worthy
of note that Cowley, in his attack on the practice of too literal
translation, should have chosen this part of Sandys' work as
illustrative of the methods which he condemns. For the translators of
the new school, though professedly the foes of the word for word method,
carried their hostility to existing theories of translation much
farther. Cowley begins, reasonably enough, by pointing out the absurdity
of translating a poet literally. "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 a person who understands not the original
reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing
seems more raving.... 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."[399] But, ignoring the possibility of a reasonable regard for
both the original and the English, such as had been adv