No one, I should venture to prophesy, will really succeed in such work unless he frankly accepts the impossibility of reproducing the original, and aims only at an equivalent for some of its aspects.
The perception of this change will enable us to realize Pope's mode of approaching the problem.

The condemnatory epithet most frequently applied to him is "artificial;" and yet, as I have just said, a modern translator is surely more artificial, so far as he is attempting a more radical transformation of his own thoughts into the forms of a past epoch.

But we can easily see in what sense Pope's work fairly deserves the name.

The poets of an older period frankly adopted the classical mythology without any apparent sense of incongruity.

They mix heathen deities with Christian saints, and the ancient heroes adopt the manners of chivalrous romance without the slightest difficulty.