Specters of Spenser: Translating the Antiquitez

Abstract

OBSERVING THAT THE RENAISSANCE was also Ruinaissance, Willy Maley imagines Spenser as a poet of ruins, raking in the ashes of English to remember the cinders of his heritage.1 In way, we might think of Spenser as companion to John Leland, or to William Camden, fellow of the antiquarian tradition.2 Although Spenser never visited Rome, and his speculations and meditations on Roman ruins are responses, via translation, to Du Bellay's experience of the ruined city, it is possible to think of these mental excavations as parallel to the disgorging by the earth, throughout the Britannia, of coins, artifacts, and burial objects:In the fields of which suburbs [i.e., the suburbs north-east of London] whiles I was first writing these matters, there were gotten out of the ground many vrnes, funerall vessells, little Images, and earthen pots, wherein were small peeces of mony coined by Claudius, New, Vespasian c to bring them from the dark tomb to light, to live once more among living men; and not simply for the sake of reviving dead titles, but in order to reveal to his contemporaries their own names. In antiquity they would discover themselves.3It is also worth being alert, though, to the idea that Spenser and Du Bellay are not merely passive recipients of the antiquarian tradition: they are also transmitters of heritage, its sedimented and recessed meanings, the hidden text encrusted in its parietal surfaces. Perhaps Camden has some intuition of when he observes that antiquity hath certaine resemblance with eternity; certainly, if we shuttle forward three centuries to another inheritor/transmitter of the tradition, we find that the work of Sigmund Freud is laced with questions and anxieties that Spenser and Du Bellay, Camden and Leland would have recognized/' Saxa loquunturV' Freud declares, hypothesizing, through the analogy of an archaeological dig, the crowning moment of successful analysis. Archaeological metaphors echo across Freud's work, from Aetiology of Hysteria, to the Dora case study, Jensen's Gravida, and Constructions in Analysis. This brother to Hanold, Jacques Derrida calls him, likening him to the archaeologist protagonist of Gradiva, this lover of stone figurines-his preferred places are the scene of excavation, the theater of archaeological digs.'' Transmitted across heritage, from Petrarch, through Spenser and Camden, down to Freud and Derrida, is not simply fascination with antiques: present, too, are the uncertainties and uneasiness that the antiquarian tradition only appears to repress-should stones speak? Might anguish, rather than pleasure, be the driving force of antiquarian searches? And if an interrogated phantom answers, what peril might the interrogator risk by listening?This constellation of ideas-recovery, retrieval, waking the dead-could be thought of as one of the defining tropes of the humanist antiquarian enterprise. The sense of reanimation is present in Petrarch's Africa, for example. …