TRANSLATIONS.

[PREFACE TO SYLVAE

OR THE SECOND PART OF POETICAL MISCELLANIES: 1685.]

For this last half Year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of Translation; the cold Prose fits of it (which are always the most tedious with me) were spent in the History of the League; the hot (which succeeded them) in this Volume of Verse Miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to my self, a kind of ease in the change of the Paroxism; never suspecting but the humour wou'd have wasted itself in two or three Pastorals of Theocritus, and as many Odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encourag'd myself to renew my old acquaintance 10 with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fix'd upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural Impulses for the undertaking: But there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible, and God forgive him who was the occasion of it. It was my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse; which made me uneasie till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his Rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For many a fair Precept in Poetry is like a seeming Demonstration in the Mathematicks, very specious in the Diagram, but failing in the Mechanick Operation. I think I have generally observ'd his instructions; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinc'd both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have at least in some places made Examples to his Rules. Yet withall, I must 20 acknowledge, that I have many times exceeded my Commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my Authors, as no Dutch Commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought that I discover'd some beauty yet undiscovered by those Pedants, which none but a Poet could have found. Where I have taken away some of their Expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarg'd them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc'd from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they 30 are such as he wou'd probably have written.

For, after all, a Translator is to make his Author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his Character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of Drawing after the Life, where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. 'Tis one thing to draw the Out-lines true, the Features like, the Proportions exact, the Colouring it self perhaps tolerable, and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the Spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill Copy of an excellent Original. Much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my Life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their Faces, by a botching 4c Interpreter. What English Readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me, or any other Man, when we commend those Authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their Fountains, if they take those to be the same Poets, whom our Ogleby's have Translated? But I dare assure them, that a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull Translation, than his Carcass would be to his living Body. There are many, who understand

PREFACE TO SYLVAE. Text from the original of 1685.