This inconvenience is common to all modern tongues, and this alone
constrains us to employ more words than the ancients needed. But
having before observed that Virgil endeavours to be short, and at
the same time elegant, I pursue the excellence and forsake the
brevity. For there he is like ambergris, a rich perfume, but of so
close and glutinous a body that it must be opened with inferior
scents of musk or civet, or the sweetness will not be drawn out into
another language.
On the whole matter I thought fit to steer betwixt the two extremes
of paraphrase and literal translation; to keep as near my author as
I could without losing all his graces, the most eminent of which are
in the beauty of his words: and those words, I must add, are always
figurative. Such of these as would retain their elegance in our
tongue, I have endeavoured to graff on it; but most of them are of
necessity to be lest, because they will not shine in any but their
own. Virgil has sometimes two of them in a line; but the scantiness
of our heroic verse is not capable of receiving more than one; and
that, too, must expiate for many others which have none.
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