Chasing Virgil’s Gnat: Spenser as Translator of Latin

The text of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex varies greatly between editions. This was already true when Spenser published the first English translation, Virgils Gnat; it is even more so today, after many generations of scholarly emendations. For nearly a century we have known which edition Spenser was working from, but no translation of that version existed, except Spenser’s. Other available translations were all based on significantly different texts, making it hard for Spenserians to get a purchase on his translation choices and thus to analyze his poem. Having recently completed an annotated prose translation of the Dumaeus text, for Richard Danson Brown and Elisabeth Chaghafi’s forthcoming edition of Spenser’s Complaints, I share here some of the insights this fascinating experience has given me—into Spenser’s approach to translation, into his Latinity, and into the Culex itself, seen through his interpretation.