Marlowe’s “Corinnae Concubitus”

Abstract:

I want to write about Christopher Marlowe’s translation (“Corinnae Concubitus”) of Ovid’s fifth elegy in book one. I plan to argue that Marlowe’s translation transforms Ovid’s elegy by their changed characterization of the speaker’s lover, Corinna. While in Ovid’s original poem, the consummation approaches rape (Ovid makes no mention of her acceptance of his attention), in Marlowe’s translation, Corinna desires him in return: she “yielded at the last” (15),  “she bad me kisse” (25). I want to read Marlowe’s addition as an index of a decreasing anxiety with regard to the classical poetic tradition on the part of English Renaissance poets. Whereas an earlier Renaissance attitude saw the Roman poetic achievement as lofty, unattainable, and forever foreclosed to poor Englishmen, Marlowe’s sense of that tradition’s willingness of “yeeld” strikes me as far less anxious, and far more assertive.

My reading depends on several assumptions:

1.     Erotic desire and imitative desire were analogous for Marlowe.

2.     The late sixteenth-century rise of vernacular literary production

3.     Translation never produces an identical text.

Keilen, Sean. Vulgar Eloquence. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. On the newly assertive attitude of

English writers toward the Roman poetic tradition.

Thomas Greene, The light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Literature. New

Haven: Yale UP, 1982. On Petrarch and early Renaissance poetic anxiety regarding the classical poetic tradition.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

I’ll use some section of this to support my claim that exact translation never occurs.