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<p>In George Puttenham’s account of pattern poetry in <i>The Art of English Poesy</i> (1589), instead of acknowledging the obvious influence from Hellenistic <i>technopaegnia</i>, the author attributes his sources to the East and presents what he claims are translations of four ‘Oriental’ pattern poems. This article reads Puttenham’s pattern poetry as a case of pseudotranslation, examining both its formation within local contexts and its impacts on the assumed source culture. The first section reassesses Puttenham’s engagement with Greek materials from the perspectives of composition and print design, arguing that his innovation remains indebted to the formal principles of <i>technopaegnia</i>. The second section situates his construction of a foreign source in the context of Renaissance receptions of hieroglyphs, emblems and pattern poems, which are assimilated through the humanist method of absorbing global materials into a classical framework. The final section examines the hypothesis that Puttenham’s examples derive from classical Chinese mono-heptametric poems, later known as pagoda poems. By tracing the modern reception of these poems as visual poetry, this section shows how Puttenham’s pseudotranslation, by inventing a ‘foreign’ source from the author’s intellectual standpoint, effectively affects the later perception of the tradition it claims to represent. </p>

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From Greek Technopaegnia to Chinese Pattern Poems: Pseudotranslation in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月18日

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  • Han Hao

摘要

In George Puttenham’s account of pattern poetry in The Art of English Poesy (1589), instead of acknowledging the obvious influence from Hellenistic technopaegnia, the author attributes his sources to the East and presents what he claims are translations of four ‘Oriental’ pattern poems. This article reads Puttenham’s pattern poetry as a case of pseudotranslation, examining both its formation within local contexts and its impacts on the assumed source culture. The first section reassesses Puttenham’s engagement with Greek materials from the perspectives of composition and print design, arguing that his innovation remains indebted to the formal principles of technopaegnia. The second section situates his construction of a foreign source in the context of Renaissance receptions of hieroglyphs, emblems and pattern poems, which are assimilated through the humanist method of absorbing global materials into a classical framework. The final section examines the hypothesis that Puttenham’s examples derive from classical Chinese mono-heptametric poems, later known as pagoda poems. By tracing the modern reception of these poems as visual poetry, this section shows how Puttenham’s pseudotranslation, by inventing a ‘foreign’ source from the author’s intellectual standpoint, effectively affects the later perception of the tradition it claims to represent.