ABSTRACT
The criticism has tended toward agreement that Spenser's translation of Les Antiquitez de Rome and Songe, published in the 1591 collection titled Complaints, is an awkwardly composed series of sonnets. Ruines has often been considered an apprentice work, translations that Spenser most likely did early in his career. The defensive aspects, so to speak, of Spenser's project bear close relations with those of Du Bellay's. In his admiring translation of Du Bellay's sonnet sequences, Spenser is encroaching on Du Bellay's territory. Some of the clunkier word choices seem to offer strong evidence in support of Du Bellay's characterization of translation in the Deffence. Translation can bear only on the sense or the signified of language; the Naif, the inborn or natural quality, of a language is constituted entirely of signifiers. Spenser's translation, here and throughout, is more celebratory of the Roman ruins.
