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Spenser and Du Bellay: Translation, Imitation, Ruin

Spenser and Du Bellay: Translation, Imitation, Ruin Hassan Melehy From French to English Until very recently, criticism has tended toward agreement that Edmund Spenser's translation of Joachim Du Bellay's 1558 Antiquitez de Rome and Songe, published in the 1591 collection titled Complaints, is an awkwardly composed series of sonnets. Commentators have tended to follow a judgment made as early as 1928 in one of the few editions of the Complaints published in the last century (the only one not to include other writings): the editor, W. L. Renwick, underscores Spenser's rendition, in the first sonnet of the Ruines of Rome, of Du Bellay's "mon cry" as "my shreiking yell"1 (I will return to this expression below). Echoing Renwick's term "noisy," which itself echoes and mocks Spenser's own phrasing, more than one critic has used the word "shrill" to describe the style of the translation.2 M. A. Screech, in his commentary on the Antiquitez, settles for saying that the translation is "quite poorly" done, although he praises Spenser's capacity to judge French poets, and invokes the translation to support his argument that Du Bellay's sequence should have earned a "more important place" in the history of European poetry.3 Indeed, the Ruines and other poems in the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Studies Penn State University Press

Spenser and Du Bellay: Translation, Imitation, Ruin

Comparative Literature Studies , Volume 40 (4) – Oct 21, 2003

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Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
1528-4212
Publisher site
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Abstract

Hassan Melehy From French to English Until very recently, criticism has tended toward agreement that Edmund Spenser's translation of Joachim Du Bellay's 1558 Antiquitez de Rome and Songe, published in the 1591 collection titled Complaints, is an awkwardly composed series of sonnets. Commentators have tended to follow a judgment made as early as 1928 in one of the few editions of the Complaints published in the last century (the only one not to include other writings): the editor, W. L. Renwick, underscores Spenser's rendition, in the first sonnet of the Ruines of Rome, of Du Bellay's "mon cry" as "my shreiking yell"1 (I will return to this expression below). Echoing Renwick's term "noisy," which itself echoes and mocks Spenser's own phrasing, more than one critic has used the word "shrill" to describe the style of the translation.2 M. A. Screech, in his commentary on the Antiquitez, settles for saying that the translation is "quite poorly" done, although he praises Spenser's capacity to judge French poets, and invokes the translation to support his argument that Du Bellay's sequence should have earned a "more important place" in the history of European poetry.3 Indeed, the Ruines and other poems in the

Journal

Comparative Literature StudiesPenn State University Press

Published: Oct 21, 2003

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