Many poems written by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt are taken from translations, Do the writers speak in their own...

Many poems by both Wyatt and Surrey are translations from
the works of the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch). Wyatt and Surrey would be
important poets in the history of English literature if they had done nothing else than
introduce Petrarch to English readers.

While it is easy to
assume that because they translated from Petrarch they were not "original" writers, this
is not the case. No translation can be utterly faithful to the original work it
translates. Therefore all translation involves some inevitable degree of
originality.

Compare and contrast, for intance, Wyatt's
translation of poem 140 from Petrarch's collection of poems known as the Rime
sparse with Howard's translation of the very same poem. Wyatt's translation
begins with the line "The long love that in my thought doth harbor"; Howard's
translation of the same poem begins with the line "Love, that doth reign and live within
my thought."

Although the two poems have basically the same
"meaning," each is highly distinctive in style. In that sense, both Wyatt and Howard do
in fact speak in their own individual voices as
poets.

However, it is important to stress that
the speakers in these poems should not necessarily be identified with Wyatt and Howard
themselves.  In other words, the speakers of the poems are dramatic creations. Their
ideas and claims are probably meant to be read ironically.  Wyatt and Surrey, following
Petrarch, seem to have created fictional speakers for their poems -- speakers whom
neither Petrarch, Wyatt, nor Surrey took seriously. Part of the fun of these poems
derives from the ways the poets use irony to mock the speakers of their
poems.