Time and Mortality in English Renaissance Translations of Petrarch’s Italian Poems

The opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere concludes with the words ‘che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno’: the meditation on the power of poetry to remember things past concludes with the dismayed realisation that the dream of love finds its main enemy in its own brevity. Interestingly, the two extant early modern English translations of this sonnet overlook this point: in Tottel’s Miscellany we read ‘as is the dream which fancy drives while sense and reason sleep’, while the translation appearing in the Hill Manuscript reads ‘each world’s joy is but a slumbering sleep’. This initial observation introduces an exploration into the treatment of a central theme in Petrarchan poetry – the motif of the human being facing time and mortality, the consciousness of the brevity of life – in the early modern English and Scottish translations of Canzoniere and Triumphi. The close reading of a number of sixteenth-century versions of Petrarch, especially focussing on the versions of the Triumphi by Henry Parker, Lord Morley and by William Fowler, as well as on the translation of the Triumphus Eternitatis attributed to Elizabeth I, allows us to see how different writers use translation as a way to understand Petrarch’s sometimes tortured conception, and end up offering their own meditational glosses on the theme.