The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland

ISBN: 9781107614703 出版年：2013 页码：198 Patricia Palmer Cambridge University Press

aesthetic and the atrocious. During the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland , colonisers such as Edmund Spenser , Sir John Harington and Sir George Carew wrote or translated epic romances replete with beheadings even as they countenanced – or conducted – similar deeds on the battlefi eld. Th is study juxtaposes the archival record of actual violence with literary depictions of decapitation to explore how violence gets transcribed into art. Patricia Palmer brings the colonial world of Renaissance England face to face with Irish literary culture. She surveys a broad linguistic and geographical range of texts, from translations of Virgil ’s Aeneid to the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Ercilla , and makes Irish-language responses to conquest and colonization available in readable translations. In doing so, she off ers literary and political historians access not only to colonial brutality but also to its ethical reservations, while providing access to the all-too-rarely heard voices of the dispossessed.