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WYATT, PETRARCH, AND THE USES OF MISTRANSLATION

by Joe Glaser

livery student of English literature knows one thing about Sir Thomas Wyatt?he introduced the sonnet into England. Informed of this service, most of us nod approval and move on?but it does not do to move on too

quickly. Serious problems surround Wyatt's sonnets, especially in light of their Italian originals. It is hard not to wonder why it was the sonnet Wyatt chose to introduce and why he chose to deal mainly with the sonnets of Petrarch. The answers to such questions are not simple. The more one thinks about Wyatt's sonnets, the more they open the way to considerations of what translation meant to Wyatt and how he felt to be an Englishman amid the first stirrings of the modern world, gazing back at the apparently serene heart of the Renaissance.

As Wyatt looked about for a way of inaugurating "Modern English Verse," he made some unexceptional choices, but also one that is still sur

prising. The natural choices were to imitate the classical and medieval, as well as the French and Italian forms that account for his more accessible work?riddles, epigrams, "ballets," songs, and satires. Wyatt seems quite at home in each of these traditions, writing with natural, charming rhythms in diction that is unstrained and clear.

The surprising choice produced more ambiguous results. In deciding to

"English" the sonnet and assume what Sidney later called "poor Petrarch's long deceased woes," Wyatt seems to have gone against the grain of his own

experience and personality. Not only did he not have a sonneteering sort of mind?his imagination is more adapted to linear development and reitera tion than to the reversals and wit of sonnet organization?but his life and times were far different from Petrarch's. Instead of a bookish career in mi

THE USES OF MISTRANSLATION 215

nor orders, Wyatt pursued an active and dangerous life. He was a politician in troubled times, serving a savagely unpredictable king in the slippery

world of international diplomacy. His head was in the lion's mouth.l It is not strange, then, that Wyatt is often at odds with the spirituality and

endless cycles of hope and rejection that characterize the Canzoniere. He is, after all, the sort of man who can describe faithless friends as lice deserting a corpse or talk of swine chewing the turds in their sties.2 The wonder in stead is that he turned to the sonnet tradition at all. The rigor of his lan guage and imagination makes the most conspicuous thing about his sonnet translations the degree to which they are unlike their originals, especially the

majority of them that are based on Petrarch. The most familiar example of Wyatt's transformation of Petrarch is

"Whoso list to hunt," the English poem he made of Rime 190, "Una can dida cerva." Petrarch's sonnet is a dream vision with subtle comic possibili ties. The speaker encounters a supernatural being?a pure white, golden antlered doe, which appears against the dark green shade of a laurel be tween two streams at sunrise. Though her collar proclaims her Caesar's and beyond the reach of ordinary men, this speaker has no choice but to follow her, like a miser following his treasure. So follow he does?until he falls into a stream and she disappears.

Wyatt's poem could not be more different and still qualify even loosely as a translation. He hardens the tone into a hopeless cynicism, strips away al

most all the visual elements, extends the encounter into an exhausting chase, transforms the dream-doe into the object of a general hunt, and identifies her with the quite real and all-too-vulnerable Anne Boleyn:

Whoso list to hunt: I know where is an hind. But as for me, alas, I may no more:

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain, And graven with diamonds in letters plain There is written her fair neck round about:

* 'Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."3

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Calling this poem unlike Petrarch's falls far short of the mark. It is an ag gressive act of deconstruction, swallowing up Petrarch's ironies in a spasm of bitterness. Notice the feeling of betrayal in Wyatt. Petrarch's speaker had not been disappointed. He was lucky to have received his vision; just seeing the deer was enough. But Wyatt's speaker feels abused. He will never

get the girl, but he is equally troubled by the unfairness of his world. He has persevered. He has been faithful. But instead of being rewarded, he has only grown old empty-handed. And he is still being cheated. It does no good to realize the chase is hopeless or resolve to leave off: his mind is caught by the deer. No mere act of will can save him.

Implicit violence is another thing Wyatt superimposes on Petrarch. His poem is full of threats. Wyatt's hind does not wander freely. She is hunted. Just now she is far enough ahead to be almost unaware of her pursuers, but they are still there. And while her collar protects her, it does so at a price. In

Petrarch the collar proclaims the dream-deer's freedom: "My Caesar's will has been to make me free."4 But this collar asserts ownership: "Caesar's I am." Wyatt almost certainly wrote "Whoso list to hunt" while Anne

Boleyn was still alive, but his decision to make her an owned and hunted creature already looks forward to the "bloody days" when he witnessed her beheading from his own cell in the Tower of London.5

What Wyatt did to "Una candida cerva" is typical. Each poem of Petrarch's he touched emerged coarser, heavier, more brutal. Stripping away the delicate imagery of the original sonnets is one way of achieving this effect, and so is curdling the speaker's attitude into a sense of injured

merit. Even the rhythms of Wyatt's sonnets and the frequent awkwardness of their language may reflect an impatience with Petrarch's ease and melo diousness. Wyatt could handle pentameter lines quite gracefully when he wanted to; his satires are a case in point. But the sonnets bristle with "broken-backed" lines that seem to have been put there intentionally. There is manuscript evidence that Wyatt sometimes deliberately roughened the meter of his poems.6 Even if that were not the case, however, he could

hardly have been unconscious of how flat some of his writing was:

Was I never yet of your love grieved, Nor never shall, while that my life doth last, But of hating myself that date is past, And tears continual sore have me wearied.

I will not yet in my grave be buried, Nor on my tomb your name y fixed fast, As cruel cause that did the spirit soon haste From the unhappy bones, by great sighs stirred.

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Then if an heart of amorous faith and will May content you, without doing grief, Please it you so to this to do relief.

If other wise ye seek for to fulfil Your disdain, ye err, and shall not as ye ween:

And ye yourself the cause thereof hath been. (Daalder, pp. 13-14) This sonnet is in the authoritative Egerton Manuscript and in the Wyatt

section of TotteVs Miscellany. It is as surely Wyatt's as are any of the poems attributed to him. But it is a very bad poem, more a travesty than a varia tion on Petrarch. The combination of lead-footed pentameters ("As cruel cause that did the spirit soon haste") and clunking rhymes is overpowering,

making the poem as painful to read as we can only hope it was to write. It is important to realize that Wyatt can write better than he does in "Was

I never yet." Though the poem does not succeed, in all probability he knew what he was doing. His decision to make the poem aggressively awkward is

entirely consistent with his decision to replace the problematic, almost play ful attitude of Petrarch's "/o non fu d'amar" with a relentless self

righteousness. In the original the speaker looks forward to having Laura's name, not his own, carved on his tomb. He hopes she will find him posthu

mously worthy of the recognition she denied him in life. But he has doubts.

Maybe her contempt will dog him to his grave. He has lost his own identity in her service, yet she may never claim him. It is likely that his tombstone

will remain forever blank. But no one promised him anything else; he has

only himself and Love to thank. Wyatt changed not just the sound but the whole point of the poem. In his sonnet it is the speaker who refuses to have the lady's name on his marker. She hasn't killed him yet, he claims. Still, he has had about enough. He has not yet renounced his love for her, but he may. And she will have only her heartlessness to blame if he does.

There are many other changes Wyatt rings on Petrarch's sonnets, but the basic point remains the same. Wyatt's "translations" are often harsh and resentful poems, conspicuously untrue to their originals. It is not easy to know exactly how we should regard the discrepancies or how they might have struck Wyatt's friends, but it is impossible to ignore them. Some critics

(the same ones in the main who see Wyatt's roughness as unconscious

bumbling) consider his departures from Petrarch evidence of cultural back wardness. "The inward significance of Petrarch's poetry eludes him; and even when he describes the same emotions in similar terms, his poem ob

stinately takes on a different meaning."7 According to this view, Wyatt was

simply out of his depth in the Petrarch translations. The poems he produced

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are not only sterile exercises, but sterile exercises badly carried out: "For ten people who honestly enjoy the Petrarch translations . . . there must be a thousand who take unforced pleasure in They flee from me,' 'My lute awake,' 'Forget not yet' and a number of other poems."8 A more fashion able idea just now is that it was the semiotic universe, the mundus signifi cans, of Wyatt's culture that caused the violence he did to Petrarch. For

Wyatt, the argument goes, the idealism and subtlety of Petrarch were liter ally inexpressible. Wyatt no more spoke Petrarch's language than Tagalog. Tudor England was moved by power, not contemplation or love, so with no

particular effort on Wyatt's part in his sonnets "The speaker's relations with women are charged with that will to power, that dialectic of domina tion and submission" whose presence effectively excludes Petrarch.9

Wyatt has not been overly fortunate in his critics. The common theme in both these ways of accounting for the stubborn individuality of his sonnets is the idea that it somehow shows his limitations as a poet. Either he was too

dim to catch the "inward significance" of Petrarch, or he was too uncon

sciously a man of his times to be able to critique the world of his immediate experience. Neither view does Wyatt much credit or explains why he has so

long and so consistently been considered a great writer. A more fundamen tal problem is that neither view explains why Wyatt turned to the sonnet and to Petrarch in the first place.

Did Wyatt misread Petrarch? Did he think the speaker in the Rime was

simply as sullen and vengeful as the speaker in a typical Wyatt sonnet? I do not see how anyone could convince himself that this was the case. Even if he had not known the Petrarch-influenced literature of ideal love, widely read commentaries and how-to books like Bembo's and Castiglione's, Wyatt

would surely have known Petrarch's reputation as a thinker. Chaucer's ref erences to Petrarch alone would have taught him that the poems to Laura

were full of hidden depths. He might still have misunderstood the sonnets in some way, but he could hardly have thought them simple.

And it is equally difficult to think that Wyatt's poems were shaped by his culture and not by himself. Readings that strip Wyatt of a clear conscious ness of his times and deny his ability to judge them may be heavy with the terms of semiotic historical criticism, but they lack a convincing historicity of their own. Tudor England was hardly monolithic. Thomas More found a

way to see his world from the outside, and he and the other humanists would have given Wyatt one system of values to pose against those of Henry VIII. Horace, the Psalmist, Serafino, Sannazaro, Plutarch, and Ala

THE USES OF MISTRANSLATION 219

manni?all of whom Wyatt read?contributed other viewpoints. And so did Petrarch.

Besides, the twists Wyatt gives to his readings of Petrarch rarely feel un examined. They are too systematic. Some of his changes are unmistakably intentional, as when Petrarch's Scylla and Charybdis become "Tween rock and rock" in "My galley charged with forgetfulness," or when the Tigris and Euphrates are transformed into the Thames in "Ever mine hap is slack." These details are part of the same "Englishing" tendency that caused Wyatt to change Petrarch's deer into Anne Boleyn or Giovanni Colonna into Thomas Cromwell in "The pillar perished is." Wyatt is al ways finding ways to recast the delicate abstractions of Petrarch into the harder realities of his own day. Rime 258 is a typical Petrarch poem. The speaker cannot enjoy Laura's favor or shrug off her anger because of his

lively memory. When she looks kindly on him, he cannot forget past re bukes. When she is angry, he takes it more to heart because of her earlier

melting looks. Petrarch, as always, is interested in the lover's psychology. He fills the poem with sighs, eloquent looks, remembrance, flagging spirits, the power of set habits, illness, and vacillation. Wyatt, by contrast, is top ical and realistic in "The lively sparks that issue from those eyes," his ver sion of the same poem. His lady's eyes are more blinding than anything that could be rigged with mirrors or burning glasses:

Was never man could anything devise The sunbeams to turn with so great vehemence

To daze man's sight as by their bright presence ....

And Wyatt's sonnet climaxes with a good Kentish thunderstorm, which he invented out of whole cloth. He abandons Petrarch's psychological insight for the sheer disorientation of a man caught up in a consuming passion, one

who finds his lady's favors every bit as explosive as her inevitable changes of heart:

Dazed am I, much like unto the guise Of one ystricken with dint of lightning. Blinded by the stroke, erring here and there, So call I for help, I not when ne where, The pain of my fall patiently bearing: For after the blaze, as is no wonder, Of deadly 'Nay!' hear I the fearful thunder. (Daalder, p. 40)

In small things as in large, Wyatt is ready to give Petrarch a new, gener ally unsentimental turn. One element of Wyatt's art is the profound phrase, usually original with him, that places the lover's feelings in the harsh light

220 COLLEGE LITERATURE

of an unforgiving morality. The best example may be "The long love that in my thought doth harbour," where it is Wyatt, not Petrarch, who sees love harboring like a thief in the speaker's mind, and speaks of "lust's negli gence" and "the heart's forest." Petrarch was no stranger to St. Augustine, but in Wyatt the radical imperfection of human nature is a constant theme. It poisons every promising experience from the beginning.

This sort of disillusioned pessimism appears throughout Wyatt's Petrarchan poems. When Petrarch misses seeing Laura's eyes ("my two sweet accustomed signs") in Rime 189 and doubts reason and "art" will take their place, he begins to despair. Wyatt turns the ending of his version, "My galley charged with for get fulness," into a bleak comment on human knowledge and hope:

The stars be hid that led me to this pain, Drowned is reason that should me comfort, And I remain despairing to the port. (Daalder, p. 26)

While in Rime 102 Petrarch has fortune become an enemy to Hannibal's empire, Wyatt refocuses the image on personal frustration. In his "Caesar when that the traitor of Egypt," he keeps Hannibal but speaks of the time "when fortune him shut/Clean from his reign, and from all his intent" (Daalder, 4, emphasis mine). The Italian is clear; the change of focus inten tionally mirrors Wyatt's own history of personal disappointments.

And Wyatt is political. "Whoso list to hunt" is relevant here, and also "The pillar perished is." In this poem Wyatt changes Rime 269, commemo

rating Petrarch's dual loss of Laura and Giovanni Colonna, into a powerful reminder of the life-or-death nature of patronage in Henry VIII's court. Pa trons competed for Petrarch's attention. There was no great urgency in his lament, which was sufficiently detached to include stylish references to the Indian and Moorish seas, gold, and oriental gems, and which concluded

with magisterial generality, discussing life's beautiful prospects and how in one morning we can lose that which took years to acquire. But Wyatt's case was desperate. Cromwell was the only bulwark between him and his many enemies. Wyatt's poem reflects real fear and self-loathing. The failure of one of his diplomatic missions had helped bring on his patron's fall; he had

made a wrong choice in backing Cromwell in the first place. The sonnet is haunted by visions of his own death. It ends with a forecast of his future, an outcast's life of supplication and danger:

What can I more but have a woeful heart,

My pen in plaint, my voice in woeful cry, My mind in woe, my body full of smart,

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And I myself myself always to hate Till dreadful death do cease my doleful state? (Daalder, p. 203)

Courtiers who guessed wrong about politics or even love affairs in Henry's court regularly found themselves in prison or on the scaffold. Wyatt was

imprisoned at least three times, and no one knows yet how he escaped being beheaded along with the rest of Anne Boleyn's "lovers," These grim po litical realities are also reflected in "I find no peace, and all my war is

done," where the speaker abruptly departs from Petrarch's abstract com

plaints against love ("[Love] neither wants me to live nor draws me from my troubles") to add a very practical consideration: "And yet of death

[love] giveth me occasion" (Daalder, p. 24).

It does not seem possible that Wyatt acted blindly in his reshaping of Petrarch. He too consistently toughens, sours, and politicizes his originals, making them reflect his own insecure and violent world. But the question of his ultimate intentions remains unanswered. If Petrarch needed so much

manipulation before he would serve Wyatt's purposes, why meddle with him at all? Petrarch was a colossus, not just in literature but in the world of ideas. He was identified with a particularly hopeful philosophy?a way of reading love and reality ultimately based on the idealism of Plato. Wyatt knew this, and just as surely he knew how little Petrarch's sonnets had in common with the England of his own day. Why not go to another source?

The best answer seems to be that Wyatt wanted Petrarch as a context for his own grim vision. His translations do not so much bring Petrarch up to date as consciously force a confrontation between the early and late Renais sance. On one side is a universe of ideal promise that in the Canzoniere has the freshness of a Botticelli Madonna. On the other is Wyatt's present, as

Machiavellian and dark as the world of the Revenge Plays. What emerges from this comparison is less easily defined, but it is an important compo nent of our understanding of Wyatt. In general it is an informed and unsen timental presentation of what life had become in his times. And it is shaped by that blend of toughminded realism and moral seriousness that makes

Wyatt a great poet.

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NOTES 1 See "The Public World of Courtly Love" in Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries (Ox

ford: Blackwell, 1964), pp. 39-53. 2 The lice are in "Lux, my fair falcon" and the swine in the epistle to Sir Francis

Brian.

3 Quotations from Wyatt are from Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems, ed. Joost Daalder (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). "Whoso list to hunt," p. 7.

4 Petrarch: Sonnets and Songs, trans. Anna Maria Armi (New York: Grosset

andDunlap, 1968), p. 283. 5 Wyatt commemorates the execution in "Who list his wealth and ease retain,"

Daalder, pp. 185-86.

6 For a discussion of Wyatt's meters and revisions, see Sir Thomas Wyatt: The

Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1978), pp. 44-55.

7 Sergio Baldi, Sir Thomas Wyatt (London: Longman, 1971), p. 31. 8 Kenneth Muir, Life and Times of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool Uni

versity Press, 1963), pp. 259-60.

9 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 151.