ABSTRACT
Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the most extreme advocate of the modern "servile path," concedes that he forfeits elements of form to achieve "total accuracy and completeness of meaning." Even Richard Bentley's famous attack on Pope's Homer did not fault it for the level of its diction or for its heroic couplets; as Richmond Lattimore observes, "Neither Bentley nor Pope would have considered any verse form more appropriate." In his Preface to his Iliad, Pope writes, "It is certain no literal Translation can be just to an excellent Original in a superior Language: but it is a great Mistake to imagine that a rash Paraphrase can make amends for this general Defect. The author knows no Liberties one ought to take, but those which are necessary for transfusing the Spirit of the Original, and supporting the Poetical Style of the Translation".
