Translation, Praise, and Politics in the Poetry of Edmund Waller

In a 1656 letter to Thomas Hobbes, the poet Edmund Waller praised Leviathan (1651) and translated verses on the glory of posterity from an Italian poem. This essay identifies that poem for the first time as the Ternali (1553), written by Pietro Aretino in praise of Guidobaldo II Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. After asking why Waller chose this poem to praise Hobbes, this essay argues that Waller also borrowed from the Ternali in A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (1655) and offers a new reading of the poem as an exploration of different forms of translation and transferral. I go on to argue that translation was central to Waller’s approach to panegyric across his career. While much scholarship on mid-seventeenth-century poetic translation has focused on Latin and associated it with royalism and retreat, this essay proposes that, as a mode of composition and a capacious metaphor, translation was an important tool for declaring altered allegiances and navigating the upheavals and dilemmas of the English Revolution. It sheds new light on the English reception of Aretino, on Waller’s compositional strategies and political imagination, and on panegyric as a dynamic art of translation. [C.A.]