The Orphic Judas: Translation, Betrayal, and The Renaissance Lyric Subject

The Orphic Judas reconsiders one of translation's most vexed associations: betrayal. In the sixteenth century, religious reformers such as Martin Luther and Erasmus translate and theorize the perils of moving the Word into words. This emerging ethics of translation, I argue, focuses on the capacious and capricious movements of betrayal as represented in two paradigms prevalent in the period: Judas' betrayal of Christ with a kiss and Peter's denial of Christ. Simultaneously, poets offer English verse translations of Petrarch's Italian canzoniere, creating a new form (the English sonnet) to accommodate their translated content. All the while, Renaissance English translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses allow that Orpheus may be both the father of lyric and the original translator. In my exploration of the co-development of translation theory and lyric poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I find that the fissures that splinter translations also crack the surface of lyric poetry, destabilizing representations of the self through the agency of betrayal. Ultimately, I argue that the hallmark of lyric---the poetic "I" at the heart of the verse---becomes another form of translation, by constructively betraying both originary texts and identities.;In the first portion of my project, I examine how Judas' betrayal refracts into lyric's concerns over the availability of bodily affect to convey interiority and intention. The lyricism of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Lucy Hutchinson's Elegies reflects translation's attempts to imagine a future through lineal descent and memorialization; yet the poems revise these concepts to include more malleable forms of desire. Peter's denial of Christ, which structures the second portion of my project, throws into relief the performative nature of affiliation and betrayal. Exegetical debates over Peter's repentance complicate the conversion narratives offered in George Herbert's The Temple. Finally, by examining the lyrical insets of Milton's Paradise Lost, I find that Eve's memories of creation and Milton's muse rely upon a Petrine version of translation-as-knowledge to reconsider the purpose of lyric within an epic framework and to yoke gender and translation through betrayal.