THE INFLUENCE OF PETRARCH'S SONNET TRANSLATIONS IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
THE INFLUENCE OF PETRARCH'S SONNET TRANSLATIONS IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

Summary/Abstract: Renaissance, as every cultural re-birth, fed on re-appropriation and reinterpretation of Classic culture. In this sense, one can argue that every Renaissance is also a translation, a re-appropriation of a cultural other that sparkles change in the domestic culture. The sonnet form was, by far, the most successful and productive poetic form in Renaissance Europe and Britain, while Petrarch was looked up to as the highest peak in this kind of production, imitated literally thousands of times. A closer look at the paradoxical history of Petrarch‘s fortune in England, though, brings up interesting questions about English Renaissance and the modes of textual acculturation in general. This paper endavours to explore the most salient points of this history and address some of these questions. What do translation choices reveal about the set of values of their translators, as compared to Petrarch‘s own, or to those of other Italian sonneteering schools (e.g. the Sicilian school)? What might have determined the birth and success of the particular metric form that came to be known as English sonnet?

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