TRANSLATION AND RUINS:

DU BELLAY, SPENSER, AND ROME

PART A: CONTEXT

1 THE CITY OF ETERNAL RUINS

a) A brief history of ruins, with some equally brief meditations

b) Ruins and Rome: Decay in the Renaissance

c) Ruins and the English

d) Ruins, Poetry, City and Empire

e) Ruins and Language

2 JOACHIM DU BELLAY

a) France and the Sonnet in 1558

b) Du Bellay and Language

c) Du Bellay and Imitation/Translation: Theory and Practice

3 SPENSER AS TRANSLATOR

a) England in 1558

b) Early English Sonnet-Sequences, and The English Sonnet in the 1570s

c) Spenser and Language

i) The Ruins and Progress of Language

ii) Spenser’s Style

d) Spenser on Translation: The Commendatory Sonnets

e) Axiochus

f) Virgil’s Gnat

g) Shepheardes Calender

h) Spenser and Italian Poets

i) Spenser and Du Bellay

4 THE CRITICAL RECORD: THE ANTIQUITEZ

a) The Antiquitez and the Critics

b) Du Bellay in England; Du Bellay Translated

5 THE CRITICAL RECORD: RUINES OF ROME

a) Introduction

b) The Attitudes of Spenser’s Contemporaries

c) The 17^th-19^th Centuries

d) 20^th-century Criticism

6 DU BELLAY AND THE SONNET

a) The Sonnet-Cycle as Epic

b) The Cycle as Sub-Cycle

i) Antiquitez and Songe

ii) Antiquitez and Regrets

iii) Antiquitez and XIII Sonnetz

iv) Antiquitez and Poemata

c) Du Bellay, Magny, and Grévin

d) Sonnet Subsets

7 THE ENGLISH INTERTEXTUALITY OF SPENSER’S TRANSLATIONS

a) The Translations and Previous Texts by English Poets

b) The Translations and Spenser’s Original Poems

c) The Ruines of Rome in Complaints

8 ANALYSIS

a) Methodology for Evaluation

b) Comparisons: The Variability of Ruins

c) Ideology: Spenser and Rome

d) Numbers and Title

e) The Architecture of the Sonnet

i) Rhyme-scheme

ii) Enjambement and the Sestet

iii) Metre

iv) Syntax

v) Rhetorical figures

PART B: CLOSE READINGS

Sonnet 1

Sonnet 3

Sonnet 5

Sonnet 7

Sonnet 12

Sonnet 15

Sonnet 17

Sonnet 25

Sonnet 32

Image:

Paul de Cock (1724-1801), ‘Landscape with Roman Ruins.’

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