Response

Marvell's poem to the translator — 'To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty' — identifies the two ways translation fails, and both are forms of theft. "He is Translations thief that addeth more, / As much as he that taketh from the Store / Of the first Author" — Marvell. Addition and subtraction are the same crime. But the more precise accusation lands earlier: "Some in this task / Take of the Cypress vail, but leave a mask, / Changing the Latine, but do more obscure / That sence in English which was bright and pure" — Marvell. The cypress veil is mourning fabric, sheer enough to see through. The translator lifts the veil and leaves a mask — replaces transparent grief with opaque performance. This is exactly the move Wyatt makes with Petrarch, except Wyatt does it knowingly, and the mask he leaves is more interesting than the veil he lifts.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writing about Wyatt two centuries later, quotes him directly — "The long love that in my thoughts I harbour, / And in my heart doth keep his residence, / Into my face presseth with bold pretence, / And there campeth, displaying his banner" — Wyatt, via Barrett Browning — and what she hears in it is the roughness, the "plague of over curious conceits" transmitted by Italian "contagion, together with better things." She is diagnosing translation as epidemiology. The better things and the plague arrive in the same shipment. You cannot quarantine the sonnet form from the conceptual excess it carries.

This is where the sabotage taxonomy sharpens. Wyatt's Petrarch translations pretend to believe in Petrarchan desire — the long love harbouring, the bold pretence pressing into the face, the banner displayed. The declarations are delivered straight. But the English resists. The syllables don't scan the way Italian allows; the monosyllables clot where polysyllables would flow; "campeth" is a word doing hard labour that "s'accampa" does lightly. Sincerity is maintained at the level of content while the form — the actual acoustic surface — grinds against it. This is not Dorn's indifference, which withdraws from inspection entirely. It is not Prynne's obscurity, which makes inspection impossible. It is constraint performing as sincerity while the constraint itself is audible. The reader hears two languages in one line: the Italian the poem wants to be and the English the poem is.

The sabotage runs through the physical medium — not through ironic distance, not through tonal withdrawal, but through the measurable fact that these syllables do not fit the template they are trying to inhabit. Translating Petrarch into English is repeating Petrarch, and the change is everything that doesn't survive the passage. Wyatt's genius is that the failure to repeat cleanly becomes the poem's actual content. What doesn't survive is what you end up hearing most.

Jonson, cataloguing the Italians in *Volpone*, performs a version of this from the other side — the receiving culture sorting its thefts. "Your PETRARCH is more passionate, yet he, / In dayes of sonetting, trusted 'hem, with much: / DANTE is hard, and few can vnderstand him" — Jonson. The dismissive ease of this — Petrarch reduced to passion, Dante to difficulty — is the English translator's revenge on the source. You flatten what you cannot carry. But "You marke me not?" — Jonson. That question, snapped at an inattentive listener, is the line that matters. The whole taxonomy of Italian literature has been delivered to someone who wasn't paying attention. The transmission fails not because the content is untranslatable but because the receiver is absent.

Wyatt's problem is the opposite: his receiver is fully present, straining to hear, and what arrives is the sound of two languages disagreeing about how long a syllable takes to say. Both are transmission failures. Only Wyatt's leaves a mask more compelling than the veil it replaced.