# Essay on the Principles of Translation (Tytler)/Chapter 10

CHAP. X.
It may perhaps appear paradoxical to assert, that it is less difficult to give to a poetical translation all the ease of original composition, than to give the same degree of ease to a prose translation. Yet the truth of this assertion will be readily admitted, if assent is given to that obser​vation, which I before endeavoured to illustrate, viz. That a superior degree of liberty is allowed to a poetical translator in amplifying, retrenching from, and embellishing his original, than to a prose translator. For without some portion of this liberty, there can be no ease of composition; and where the greatest liberty is allowable, there that case will be most apparent, as it is less difficult to attain to it.
For the same reason, among the different species of poetical composition, the lyric is that which allows of the greatest liberty in translation; as a freedom both of thought and expression is agreeable to its character. Yet even in this, which is the freest of all species of translation, we must guard against licen​tiousness; and perhaps the more so, that we are apt to persuade ourselves that the less caution is necessary. The difficulty indeed is, where so much freedom is allowed, to define what is to be accounted licentiousness in poetical translation. A moderate liberty of amplifying and retrenching the ideas of the original, has been granted to the translator of prose; but is it allowable, even to the translator of a lyric poem, to add new images and new thoughts to those of the original, or to enforce the sentiments by illustrations which are not in the original? As the limits between free translation and paraphrase are more easily perceived than they can be well defined, instead of giving a general answer to this question, I think it safer to give my opinion upon particular examples.
​Dr Lowth has adapted to the present times, and addressed to his own countrymen, a very noble imitation of the 6th ode of the 3d book of Horace: Delicta majorum immeritus lues, &c. The greatest part of this composition is of the nature of parody; but in the version of the following stanza there is perhaps but a slight excess of that liberty which may be allowed to the translator of a lyric poet:
Here the translator has superadded no new images or illustrations; but he has, in two parts of the stanza, given a moral application which is not in the original:
"That ill adorns the form, while it corrupts the heart;" and "Studious of every praise, but virtue, truth, and sense." These moral lines are unquestionably a very high improvement of the original; but they seem to me to transgress, though indeed very slightly, the liberty allowed to a poetical translator.
In that fine translation by Dryden, of the 29th ode of the 3d book of Horace, which upon the whole is paraphrastical, ​the version of the two following stanzas has no more licence than what is justifiable:
In the following poem by Mr Hughes, which the author has intitled an imitation of the 6th ode of the 2d book of Horace, the greatest part of the composition is a just and excellent translation, while the rest is a free paraphrase or commentary on the original. I shall mark in Italics, all that I consider as paraphrastical: the rest is a just translation, in which the writer has assumed no more liberty, than was necessary to give the poem the easy air of an original composition.