Drummond and Marino: Selection, Imitation, and Transcreation

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See, for example, Wallerstein, “The Style of Drummond of Hawthornden in Relation to His Translations”; Jack, “Drummond: The Major Scottish Sources”; and McClure, “Drummond of Hawthornden and Poetic Translation.” On the general picture of translation and imitation in Scotland during this period, see, for example, McClure, “Translation and Transcreation in the Castalian Period.” 2. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature. On Drummond see especially chapter 4, and for the principal discussion of Marino's influence on him, see pages 135–43. 3. See Praz, Seicentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra; and, for example, Guss, John Donne, esp. 80–82, and Wallerstein, Richard Crashaw, chap. 4. 4. “Lycidas,” I. 106, of course. 5. Kastner, ed., The Poetic Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1:7. A century later, Kastner's is still the only complete critical edition: a very substantial selection, however, with useful annotations and a critical introduction, is MacDonald, ed., William Drummond of Hawthornden. There is also no critical monograph on Drummond more recent than Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden. Recent histories of Scottish literature give him due but necessarily summary attention, with no particular emphasis placed on his relationships with his models. Among the best discussions is in Spiller, “Poetry after the Union 1603–1660.” An important revisionist discussion of the undervalued Scottish literary achievement of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Drummond presented as a key figure, is the introduction to Jack and Rozendaal, eds., The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature 1375–1707. Though not essentially a work of literary criticism, MacDonald, ed., The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden is most informative in the context of any examination of Drummond's relationships to his sources. 6. Croce, ed., Giambattista Marino: Poesie Varie, 104. All references are to this edition. More recent critical editions are Pozzi, Tutte le opere di Giovan Battista Marino and Getto, ed., Opere scelte di Giovan Battista Marino e dei Marinisti. For a convenient and informative introduction to Marino and his period, see Rosa, La lirica del Seicento. 7. Kastner (The Poetic Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1:169) suggests that this line was prompted not by anything in Marino but by Sidney's “Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low” (Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 39, l. 4). Even so, the nativity imagery is a pointed addition by Drummond. 8. See Morgan, “Gavin Douglas and William Drummond as Translators,” for a discussion of the full implications of Drummond's change of the azzuro of his model, a madrigal by Tasso, to the much more unusual (in this context) Greene. 9. [D]uris genuit te cautibus horrens / Caucasus, Hyrcanaeque admodunt ubera tigres. 10. Treated as such metri causa, at any rate, by a still-familiar convention. 11. Altered in the reappearance of this sonnet as number XV of “Flowres of Sion” to “sharpe Diademe.” 12. Surely one of Marino's most gracefully conceived details is that the last of the four rhyming words in the sets beginning in these lines are spine and rose.