Translating Petrarch's Poetry: 'L'Aura del Petrarca'from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century ed. by Carole Birkan-Berz, Guillaume Coatalen, and Thomas Vuong

Abstract

Reviewed by: Translating Petrarch's Poetry: 'L'Aura del Petrarca'from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century ed. by Carole Birkan-Berz, Guillaume Coatalen, and Thomas Vuong Peter Hainsworth Translating Petrarch's Poetry: 'L'Aura del Petrarca'from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century. Ed. by Carole Birkan-Berz, Guillaume Coatalen, and Thomas Vuong. (Transcript, 8) Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xiii+277 pp. £74.99. ISBN 978–1–78188–663–2. This collection of fifteen essays by scholars and writers from a range of countries brings to bear on Petrarch recent interest not only in translation as normally conceived but also in reformulations and fragmentations of the original and its appropriation in other media, and in the roles translations and other responses play and have played socially and culturally. The first three essays in Part i consider reworkings of Petrarch in sixteenth-century England and France. Looking at Wyatt, Surrey, and others in England, Chris Stamatakis explores their fragmentation of Petrarchan poems and the implications of the English predilection for epigrammatic reductions of the originals; Myron McShane similarly considers the Petrarchan fragmentation practised by Du Bellay in the two versions of L'Olive, while Alessandro Turbil turns to how French versions of the Trionfi played an important part in the shift of interest in France from the [End Page 505] philosophic and moral Latin works to the lyricism of the Canzoniere. In Chapter 4 Francisco José Rodríguez Mesa discusses the remarkable phenomenon of the first (almost) full Spanish version of the Canzoniere, made by the Portuguese Enrique Garcés during his career as a mining engineer in South America. Then come other media. Giulia Zava examines the interpretative, even allegorical, significance of the images, probably by one Antonio Grifo, in the Queriniano incunable of 1470, and Massimo Ossi finds a corresponding creative appropriation of Petrarch (and other poets) in the careful and sensitive interplay between texts and music in Luca Marenzio's book of madrigals of 1585, and its place in Ferrarese court culture of the time. The second part moves forward in time. Dominique Chaigne examines the versions of Petrarchan sonnets by Georges de Scudery and also Mathilde d'Aguilar, the romance by his sister Madeleine, which makes its protagonist a friend of Petrarch and Laura in an idealized pastoral Avignon. The issue of the untranslatable in the form of Petrarch's puns on the name of Laura is then discussed by Jennifer Rushworth, who also includes attempts in nineteenth-century France to appropriate Petrarch as a French poet and even to 'translate' his body back to Avignon. Translatability is again to the fore in Riccardo Raimondo's discussion of how twentieth-century French translators have veered between Hermes and Orpheus, that is, between more literal versions and more creative ones, with some resolution being achieved under the aegis of Apollo. We are now definitely in the world of modern poetry. Thomas Vuong compares the work of Tim Atkins and Emmanuel Hocquard, who do not translate Petrarch in the normal sense, but treat him as the founder of a lyric mode dominant in European poetry that they can only question and subvert. A more subtle and complex response is found by Carol Birkan-Berz in Geoffrey Hill, who effectively rejects the Poundian cult of Dante in favour of an extremely alert, often satiric return to Petrarch. In Part III Vuong discusses Yves Bonnefoy's view of Petrarch, and Jacques Roubaud the rhyme schemes of Petrarch's sonnets. Then come two examples of partly playful avant-garde responses, with Atkins charting their varieties, including pictorial ones, and Robert Sheppard recounting the strategies he has adopted in the face of Canzoniere 3, 'Era il giorno ch'al sol si scoloraro'. A concluding essay by Guillaume Cortalen discusses a projected database (EUROPETRARCA) which aims (to my mind unrealistically) to include all borrowings, however fragmentary, and reworkings in other media, across a vast range of countries and languages, with attention also to historical and biographical factors. The general discussions are of interest in almost every chapter. And some chapters are critically penetrating and informative throughout, particularly those on Enrique Garcés, the Queriniano illustrations, Luca Marenzio...