Emancipating Translation

On Sir John Denham (1615-1669):

He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the clearest, and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors, may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge, but by poetical genius, who yet, by a mistaken ambition of exactness, degraded, at once, their originals and themselves.

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1959; 1779–81), I, p. 59.