ABSTRACT
These much cancelled lines are drafted on the paper paste-down facing Nbk 17 p. 1. They are mostly in pencil now so faint as to be often indecipherable but the last two along with part of the first and sixth lines are written neatly in ink. They have been identified by Carlene Adamson (BSM vi 56–7) as a translation of the first seven lines of an octava real (an eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc) from Don Carlos’ speech in Calderón's La cisma de Inglaterra (The Schism in England) which recounts his falling in love with Ana Bolena (Act I, ll. 333–444). It is likely that they were written after 22 October 1820 when S. returned from Pisa to Bagni San Giuliano with Thomas Medwin (Mary Jnl i 337), possibly between 14 November and 13 December, when Mary records herself, S. and Medwin studying Spanish, including Calderón (Mary Jnl i 340–2 and Mary L i 168) but perhaps by 10 November (see below). The stanza on which S.’s translation is based is the second of four (ll. 397–404) from Carlos’ speech that he had transcribed in a letter to Maria Gisborne of 16 November 1819 (see L ii 155–6), with the comment ‘Is there any thing in Petrarch finer than the 2d stanza’. (This letter was first published by Mary in (1840) ELTF ii 244–6, though with many differences from S.’s transcription of the Spanish in Bod. MS. Shelley c. 1, ff. 319r–319v). The stanza reads thus: Allí el silencio de la noche fría, el jazmín que en las redes se enlazaba, el cristal de la fuente que corría, el arroyo que a solas murmuraba, el viento que en las hojas se movía, el aura que en las flores respiraba, todo era amor: ¿qué mucho, si en tal calma aves, fuentes y flores tienen alma? (ed. Ann L. Mackenzie) ‘From the Spanish of Calderon’ in Medwin's Sketches in Hindoostan, with other Poems (1821), listed as ‘lately published’ in the London Magazine iii (May 1821) 580, a translation of ll. 349–436 from the same speech, is rightly judged by Forman to be ‘not unsuggestive of Shelley's coöperation’ (Forman 1876–7 iv 283; see also Forman's note in Medwin (1913) 488). If S.’s translation of the stanza presented above was done at the same time as Medwin was preparing ‘From the Spanish of Calderon’ it must have been before 10 November 1820 since S.’s letter to Ollier of that date notes that ‘The Lion Hunt’, the first poem in Sketches, had already been sent to him for publication (L ii 246). Medwin notes S.’s admiration of Carlos's speech and his transcription in the above letter to Maria Gisborne and presents a different translation of ll. 405–20, italicizing lines he says were ‘corrected by Shelley’ in Medwin (1913) 244. Likewise, the last two lines of Medwin's translation of II. 377–80 in Medwin (1824) 200 are different from the corresponding passage in ‘From the Spanish of Calderon’. For commentary on the translations from Carlos’ speech published by Medwin, see Forman 1876–7 iv 283, Ann L. Mackenzie, ‘La cisma de Inglaterra: dos versiones inglesas del monólogo de Carlos sobre Ana Bolena’, Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico iv (1989) 53–77, and The Schism in England, ed. Ann L. Mackenzie (1990) 202–3.
