ABSTRACT
Written first in pencil between July and October 1819, these lines were subsequently overwritten in ink. Given that, in Mary Quinn's words, S. ‘worked most intensively from the back to the front of the notebook’ (MYRS vi p.lii), their position in Nbk 12 might suggest that the pencilled draft is amongst the nbk's earlier entries and possibly the first of its fragmentary translations and transcriptions from Calderón. S. had begun reading Calderón with Maria Gisborne in Livorno soon after he, Mary and Claire arrived there on 17 June and continued until they left for Florence on 30 September. His letter to Peacock of?20–21 June suggests his motivation to study Calderón may initially have been, at least in part, to learn Spanish with a view to moving to Spain for his health: ‘The doctors… tell me I must spend the winter in Africa or Spain; I shall of course prefer the latter if I choose either—’ (L ii 99; see E. Herman Hespelt, ‘Shelley and Spain’, PMLA xxxviii (1923) 889). The first evidence of S.’s interest in Calderón is a letter of 25 July in which he informs Hogg he has been reading two plays, ‘“La Devocion della Cruz” and the “Purgatorio di San Patricio”’ (L ii 105), neither a source of any translations or transcriptions in Nbk 12, though the ‘plagiarism’ from the second act of the latter in The Cenci III i 247–57, perhaps S.’s first attempt to render Calderón into English, must have been drafted by 25 July (see 1839 ii 276 and no. 213). Charles Clairmont, who had been in Spain for the previous fifteen months, arrived in Livorno on 4 September 1819 and S. told Peacock in a letter of 21 September that he made him ‘read Spanish all day long’, adding ‘I have already learnt sufficient to read with great ease their Poet Calderon. I have read about 12 of his Plays’ (L ii 120). Mary records S. reading Calderón with both Maria and Charles between 13 and 17 September (Mary Jnl i 296–7), and it is likely that S. continued with the latter after 30 September until his departure on 10 November. In an earlier letter of 24 August 1819 to Peacock he referred to ‘some thoughts, if I find that I cannot do anything better, of translating some of [Calderón's] plays’ (L ii 115). In similar vein he told Hunt in a letter of 16 November that ‘some of the ideal dramas of Calderon … are perpetually tempting me to throw over their perfect & glowing forms the grey veil of my own words.—’ (SC vi 1081) The preoccupation of these lines with the deceptively tranquil surface of water recalls Lucretius, De Re. Nat. v 1004–05, and Eugenia's speech warning of the dangers of the ‘still waters’ as opposed to the ‘noisy cascades’ of love in Act II of Guárdate del agua mansa: que amor bachiller no tiene mas fondo, que solo el ruido: Aquel emblema lo acuerde del perdido caminante, à quien de noche acontece, que alumbrado del estruendo con que del monte desciende pequeño arroyo, le assusta, le perturba, y estremece: y huyendo dèl, dà en el rio: porque à todos les parece, que es manso cristal aquel 199que aun las guijas no le sienten, y en su agua perecen, pues que no tiene riesgo aduierte la ruidosa, porque el riesgo el agua mansa le tiene. (Octava Parte de Comedias, ed. Vera Tassis (1684) in Comedias (1973) xvii 413) ‘This kind of puppy love, let me remind you, is nothing but a lot of noise. A good emblem for this love is that of the lost traveler, who late at night hears a great stir of crashing water that descends the mount, and he misapprehends the noise, trembles, and is afraid; and wildly fleeing the cascade, he falls in the river, which all perceived to be tranquil crystal because they cannot even see its current move, and cruelly they perish there. The noisy stream warns it is what it does not seem: completely safe; it is the still waters that are likely to kill.’ (trans. David M. Gitlitz, Guárdate De La Agua Mansa/Beware of still waters (1984) 133)
