ocated by Chapman
or by minor translators like W. L. and Vicars, Cowley suggests a more
radical method. Since of necessity much of the beauty of a poem is lost
in translation, the translator must supply new beauties. "For men
resolving in no case to shoot beyond the mark," he says, "it is a
thousand to one if they shoot not short of it." "We must needs confess
that after all these losses sustained by Pindar, all we can add to him
by our wit or invention (not deserting still his subject) is not likely
to make him a richer man than he was in his own country." Finally comes
a definite statement of Cowley's method: "Upon this ground I have in
these two Odes of Pindar taken, left out and added what I please; nor
make it so much my aim to let the reader know precisely what he spoke as
what was his way and manner of speaking, which has not been yet (that I
know of) introduced into English, though it be the noblest and highest
kind of writing in verse." Denham, in his lines on Fanshaw's translation
of Guarini, had already approved of a similar method:

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make translations and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.
Feeding his current, where thou find'st it low
Let'st in thine own to make it rise and flow;
Wisely restoring whatsoever grace
Is lost by change of times, or tongues, or place.

Denham, however, justifies the procedure for reasons which must have had
their appeal for the translator who was conscious of real creative
power. "Poesy," he says in the preface to his translation from the
_Aeneid_, "is of so subtle a spirit that in the pouring out of one
language into another it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not
added in transfusion, there will remain nothing but a _caput mortuum_."
The new method, which Cowley is willing to designate as _imitation_ if
the critics refuse to it the name of translation, is described by Dryden
with his usual clearness. "I take imitation of an author in their
sense," he says, "to be an endeavor of a later poet to write like one
who has written before him, on the same subject; that is, not to
translate his words, or be confined to his sense, but only to set him as
a pattern, and to write as he supposes that author would have done, had
he lived in our age, and in our country."[400]

Yet, after all, the new fashion was far from revolutionizing eith