Translated Geographies: Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Time”
Griffiths, Huw
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2/ Special Issue 3 (September, 1998)
Abstract
This paper deals with two ironic movements in relation to Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Time”: the trope of the ruin and the troping mechanism of translation. In turn, both these movements will be looked at in relation to the Elizabethan development of a national geography. So, whilst this paper has a particularly narrow focus — one relatively obscure poem by Edmund Spenser — I believe it to have broader significances in a wider project that might seek to interrogate the notion of translation within the national cultures of the early modern period. One way of performing that interrogation of translation within a nationalist context is to rethink translation in spatial terms. The movement of a translation across borders reveals the ironies of the nationalist project, rooted in heredity — the ancient history of the nation. Translation’s “disjunctive temporality,” crossing and marking the borders of time and space, renders ironic a national history based on self recognition and continuity. The spatial implications of the word “translation” of course have a history that extends beyond postmodern critique, and the paper will also look at the functioning of the early modern translatio imperii in Spenser’s poem.
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