Chapter Two: Forming the ‘first garland of free Poësie’ in France and England, 1558–91

Summary

The self-conscious appropriation of Culex by Virgils Gnat invites the consideration of Spenser's practice as a translator elsewhere in Complaints. I have argued that he stands between the medieval tradition of faithful ‘sententious’ translation and later conceptions of translation as psychological paraphrase. In Virgils Gnat, Spenser adapts the original to voice his own social and literary anxieties: the English poem both translates Culex and discloses aspects of Spenser's relationship with Leicester. In the light of this practice, we must ask if Ruines of Rome, Spenser's translation of Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome, exhibits the same kind of appropriation. Les Antiquitez presents Spenser with different technical problems from Culex: a modern language rather than an ancient, and a verse form he must negotiate and cannot ignore. Moreover, in translating the poetry of a near-contemporary, he is more explicitly occupied with his ambitions as a vernacular poet than he was in Virgils Gnat, since for Spenser, Du Bellay's achievement manifests the successful raising of a vernacular literature by a self-consciously innovative poet. Ruines of Rome is both an act of homage to Du Bellay and an expression of Spenser's own poetic ambitions: he adapts the French poem ideally to inaugurate a new English form of poetry.

While it is clear that Ruines of Rome provides a direct link between Spenser and the continental Renaissance, the belief that the translation is Spenserian juvenilia has undermined its status.