La Poésie en Voyage: Vincent Voiture's Lyric Verse in Seventeenth-Century English Translation

Abstract

AbstractAs was the case for other seventeenth-century French lyric poets whose poetry was translated in contemporary England, travel played an important role in the transmission of Vincent Voiture's poetry across the Channel. Voiture spent a brief period at the court of Henrietta Maria in 1633, and his poems may well have been read aloud and circulated in manuscript at the English court. One of Voiture's poems was translated by Thomas Stanley, who spent time in France during the Interregnum and encouraged the reading and translating of contemporary French poetry among his friends on his return. Voiture's other seventeenth-century English translators included Oldham and Etherege. This article studies the five seventeenth-century English translations of Voiture's poems as representative of how French lyric verse 'travelled' to contemporary England in translation. The paper highlights problems of cultural specificity relating to the translation of salon verse, and then examines how some of the cultural and s...