Renaissance Studies Vol. 0 No. 0 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12679 The space in between. Creating meaning between Richard Fanshawe’s original and translated poetry Tiago Sousa Garcia Richard Fanshawe (1608–1666), royalist, diplomat, translator, and poet, is not a household name, even for students of the seventeenth century. Fanshawe may have had many different roles: as the secretary to the Prince of Wales during the civil war; as the diplomatic envoy who finalised the negotiations for the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza; as ambassador to Portugal and Spain; as translator of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido and Camões’ Os Lusíadas; and, finally, as a poet attached to an amorphous group sometimes known as the ‘Cavalier Poets’.1 Yet, the names of Thomas Carew, John Suckling and Richard Lovelace are the ones that we most readily associate with this group; Fanshawe is usually forgotten. When he is remembered by literary scholars today, it is usually for his translations: of Guarini and Camões, and possibly also Horace. Fanshawe did write original poetry – ‘A Canto of the Progress of Learning’, ‘On His Majesty’s Great Ship’ or ‘On the Earle of Straffords Trial’ – but his translations are unquestionably much better known than even his most famous original poem, ‘An Ode Upon Occasion of His Majesties Proclamation’. In literary history, Fanshawe is first, foremost and, often, just a translator. His designation as such presupposes that there is a difference between being a poet and being a translator – that these are differ- ent activities that carry different value judgements. This article will focus on that distinction – or rather, it will focus on challenging the poet-translator di- chotomy. It will argue that, for Fanshawe, translation constituted not an auxil- iary, subservient form of literary work, but rather a fully-fledged original poetic practice in its own right. More significantly, it will argue that in Fanshawe’s work the distinction between original poetry and translation is non-hierarchical, and that the space between his own original and translated poetry is a site in which he creates meaning: not only in taking translation as an autonomous creative expression but in establishing a meaningful dialogue between the translations and his original poetry. For the reader this means 1 Most famously in Robin Skelton (ed.), Cavalier Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). For more recent redefinitions of the term see Nigel Smith, ‘Cross-Channel Cavaliers’, The Seventeenth Century, 32 (2017), 433–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/02681 17X.2017.1397434; Nicholas McDowell, ‘Towards Redefinition of Cavalier Poetics’, The Seventeenth Century, 32 (2017), 413–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/02681 17X.2017.1394118. © 2020 The Authors. Renaissance Studies published by Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2 Tiago Sousa Garcia that, where translations and original poetry are published in the same vol- ume, here the 1648 reissue of his translation of Il Pastor Fido with additional poems, it is necessary to read across both types of text looking for, recalling, and identifying connections – the same subjects, even the same lines – that shed a different light and offer new perspectives on both pieces. In the 1648 Pastor Fido, readers are encouraged to read in this manner, between original poems and their respective translations, by the mise-en-page that places them on the same opening, in facing pages. This is the case for the two examples of self-translation (‘The Escuriall / In Aedes magnificas...’ and ‘On His Majesties Great Shippe / Ad eximiae magnitudinis Navem...’) dis- cussed below in which their physical placement on the page contributes to the unstable relationship between original and translation already latent in the very concept of self-translation. More often than not, however, the relationship that concerns us here is not a direct one – that is, between one original poem and its corresponding translation – but rather between poems that are apparently unrelated: translations of continental and classic writers authored by Fanshawe, and Fanshawe’s own original compositions. In these cases, as is the case with the other examples discussed in this article (‘On the Earle of Straffords Trial’ and ‘The Fall’), this relationship is not reflected in the physical organisation of the volume. Rather than placing these poems on facing pages, or even grouping them in succession, they are deliberately printed apart, their distance in the vol- ume becoming itself another layer of signification. In these cases, the connec- tion between the original poem and the translation is established by repeated themes and, more clearly, repeated lines. The physical work of flicking through pages between these poems is left for the attentive reader to perform. It is well recognised that the traditional binaries usually associated with translation – source and target language, faithful and unfaithful renderings – are not sufficient to describe the complex processes at play in the early mod- ern period. Warren Boutcher suggests that it might be more productive to read ‘Renaissance translations as “original” works by authors who happen to be translating’.2 Marie Alice-Belle and Brenda M. Hosington stress the role played by translators in the book market, suggesting a new model that places early modern translators at the intersection of communication circuits for both the original and the translated work, highlighting ‘their place among other mediators, such as travellers, booksellers, copyists, and members of international print networks and transnational reading communities’.3 Earlier, A. E. B. Coldiron had demonstrated how translations have defined the 2 Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46. 3 Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Translation, History and Print: A Model for the Study of Printed Translations in Early Modern Britain’, Translation Studies, 10 (2017), 17, https://doi.org/10.1080/14781 700.2016.1213184. The space in between 3 patterns of literary transmission in Europe,4 and how their physical presenta- tion on the page can visibly carry their alterity – as in the case of John Wolfe’s trilingual edition of the Book of the Courtier (1588) – or at the very least the ‘foreign residues’ that betray ‘anxieties and ambivalences’5 about the role of translation in English literature. In a more recent study, Coldiron has noted how early modern paratexts – in particular portraits of translators – have worked to cement their claim to authorship: ‘The visibility of translators in these images not only suggests their importance in emergent constructions of authorship, but also conveys, in this condensed, paratextual shorthand, how their writing, sometimes depicted as “authorial” work, is to be understood and valued.’6 Writing from a more theoretical perspective on translation, Karen Emmerich goes even further in her evaluation of the role of translation by calling attention to the fact that that which we colloquially call an ‘original’ and assume to be a stable and fixed text is anything but: ‘The textual condi- tion is one of variance, not stability.’7 Emmerich attempts to reconcile two disciplines – textual studies and translation studies – that though aware of each other’s existence rarely engage with each other. Translation, writes Emmerich, ‘may be conceived as a form of translingual editing, by which a translator both negotiates existing versions and creates a new one of her own, in a language other than that (or those) in which the work was first (or previ- ously) articulated’.8 In this understanding of translation as an equal partici- pant in the evolution of a text, Emmerich follows André Lefevere and Susan Bassnet’s idea of translation as ‘one of the many forms in which works of liter- ature are “rewritten”, one of many “rewritings”’.9 This article builds on these recent developments by analysing Fanshawe’s work through a perspective that, on the one hand, privileges translations as ‘complex constructs, influenced by time, space, socio-historical and socio- cultural contexts’, and, on the other, recuperates the notion of translation as ‘authorial’ work that Coldiron alludes to.10 In the case of Fanshawe’s work, 4 A. E. B. Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO97 81139 681056. 5 A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Form[e]s of Transnationhood: The Case of John Wolfe’s Trilingual Courtier’, Renaissance Studies, 29 (2015), 108, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12116. 6 A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘The Translator’s Visibility in Early Printed Portrait-Images and the Ambiguous Example of Margaret More Roper’, in Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington (eds.), Thresholds of Translation: Paratexts, Print, and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Britain (1473–1660), Early Modern Literature in History (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 54, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_3. 7 Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, Literatures, Cultures, Translation (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 2. 8 Emmerich, 2. 9 André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, ‘Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights: The “Cultural Turn” in Translation Studies.’, in Translation, History and Culture (London: Pinter, 1995), 10. 10 Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Translation and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies, 29 (2015), 9, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12111. 4 Tiago Sousa Garcia these complex constructs, as I have already suggested, are noticeable in the interplay between his original poetry and his translations published in the same volume. What this article proposes is the erasure of the self-imposed barrier between translated and original material in order to achieve a reading capable of crossing these categories towards a more holistic view of literary work.