The main thrust of the author’s argument in this paper is that, towards the middle of the seventeenth century – in the years, roughly, between 1620 and 1650 – there occurs a significant shift within the discourse on translation by literary translators in England and France, to the effect that from this period onwards it becomes possible to conceive of ‘literary translation’ as a separate type, a separate category of translation. The shift, as may be inferred from the dates the author mentioned, is connected with the emergence of what, in England, John Denham and Abraham Cowley called the ‘new’ or ‘libertine’ way of translating, and what in France became known as the ‘belles infidèles’.