Denham’s translation strategy

Venuti points out that Denham’s translation strategy was not new. He was in fact following the Horatian concept that translators, if they are also poets, should create and not translate word for word. Denham was only consolidating a translation method that was part of an aristocratic literary culture. In 1656, it appeared new because it was harking back to the translation methods of a past of hegemonic royalty. Denham advocated free translation, but he wished to infuse it with a “new spirit” (qtd in Venuti 49). The new spirit is the domestication that he brought into the practice of translation, by which Virgil reads like an Englishman and not like a foreign author: “as speech is the apparel of our thoughts, so are there certain Garbs and Modes of speaking, which vary with the times… and therefore if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit that he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age” (qtd in Venuti 50). This decision to make Virgil an Englishman is in keeping with the nationalism of Denham. So is his decision to steer clear of burlesque versions of Virgil that were popular in Europe in those days. Denham’s translation was an answer to a very typical English problem: “the need for a ‘new’ cultural practice that will enable the defeated royalist segment of the Caroline aristocracy to regain its hegemonic status in English culture” (Venuti 51). Moreover, in choosing to translate Virgil, Denham was joining the elite club of translators who chose to translate the classics. Thus Denham was the magnet around which the neoclassical tradition of translation – which emphasized fluency above everything else – followed by Dryden and Pope, consolidated.