Recensioni / Book Reviews / Revues des Livres

Guittone d’Arezzo. Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. and ed. Antonello Borra. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. 237. ISBN 9781487501242.

Guittone d’Arezzo, caposcuola of the so-called Siculo-Tuscan poets, or more commonly the guittoniani (such was his influence), had been relegated by many literary historiographers to a position of secondary importance, a bridge between the aristocratic Sicilian School and the Dolce Stil Novo, and viewed merely as the figure against whom members of the latter school—and Dante most pointedly—endeavoured to fashion a distinct new poetic identity. In recent times, this unfavourable assessment of Guittone’s importance has been considerably tempered, though for today’s English-language students and scholars, his oeuvre remains largely a footnote as a not-insignificant precursor to Dante’s that has, at most, supplied those capable of reading thirteenth-century Italian with some curious examples of a Tuscan-based, Provençal- and Sicilian-inspired poetry. The present volume assembles a wide variety of previously edited versions of Guittone’s poems and letters and provides for each work a new parallel translation in English, giving entrance to a far-greater breadth of the much-maligned poet’s repertoire than has ever before been made available to an English-reading public. Antonello Borra, the volume’s editor and translator, contributes an intro- ductory essay comprising Guittone’s biography, in which he addresses the poet’s two personae—“Guittone” and “Friar Guittone”; acknowledgement of the main critical editions of the poet’s lyrical works and letters, noting the recognized imperfection of Egidi’s comprehensive critical edition of Guittone’s poetry and the more reliable collection of his letters edited by Margueron; an overview of extant manuscripts containing Guittone’s material, virtually all of which has been transmitted through the famous canzoniere Vaticano 3793, canzoniere Laurenziano Rediano 9, and canzoniere Palatino 418 (now Banco Rari 217) manuscripts, from which almost all pre–Dolce Stil Novo Sicilian and Tuscan poetry comes down to us; the division of his works as presented in the volume, which mirrors that of the Laurentian manuscript in which “Guittone’s” amorous works are wedged between “Friar Guittone’s” moral writings (Borra’s first and second sections con- tain Friar Guittone’s “Letters” and “Moral and Religious Canzoni”; his third and fourth sections, Guittone’s “Love Canzoni” and “Teachings on Love”; and his fifth

Quaderni d’italianistica, Vol. 38, no. 1, 2017, 251–309 Recensioni / Book Reviews / Revues des Livres section, Friar Guittone’s “Cycles on Vices and Virtues”); and concluding remarks on the poet’s legacy within the Italian literary tradition. Prefacing these obligatory components is a section titled “The Great Enemy,” in which Borra addresses the origins of Guittone’s ill literary repute: Dante’s vicious invectives against the poet in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, in the Commedia (with explicit attacks in Inferno and possibly veiled ones in Purgatorio), and, in all likelihood, in the Vita Nova. Here, Borra seeks to convince readers that 700 years of critical disregard for the Aretine (most famously culminating in De Sanctis’s characterization of Guittone, as Borra notes, as “not a poet, rather a subtle debater in verse,” and “neither a poet nor […] an artist,” lacking “inner sense of measure and harmony” and “taste and elegance” [8n17]) cannot help but to have been conditioned by Dante’s near-contemporary excoriation of him in the Florentine’s own masterworks. Borra defers analysis on the motivation and any eventual justification for Dante’s vituperation to another forum, offering instead his already-published “Guittone all’Inferno?” as a point of departure. Given that this is the most significant mise à disposition of Guittone’s work in English, I would have liked for the editor-translator to have provided a more substantial analysis of the translation methodology employed. The few words shared with the reader on the English renditions, however, do accurately foretell what follows: a sober translation that seeks to provide, above all else, clarity and access to the content—including the poet’s irony, critiques, and reasoning—at the admitted expense of the stylistic complexities of the original. This approach is not unwelcome in a bilingual edition such as this: while the extent to which a monolingual reader can gain a significant appreciation for a seven-centuries-old poetic corpus from any “faithful” set of modern translations is debatable, this attempt, with the old Tuscan a fronte, is most valuable in facilitating access to the original text for those who already possess an adequate command of Italian but who might not otherwise be up to the challenge of tackling this Medieval oeuvre without a reliable point of reference. The reader should be able to locate reasonable interlingual syntactic and lexical correspondences within the limits of each poetic proposition without having to work through excessive literary licence on the part of the translator; and at the same time, the translator has provided agreeable English texts that spare readers the insufferable disjunction of renditions seeking to reproduce too strictly the syntactic structures characteristic of the origi- nals. The edited Tuscan version of each work is enriched here with useful stylistic information in footnotes, such as genre and metre, and with critical commentary

— 252 — Recensioni / Book Reviews / Revues des Livres on the text itself, together with eventual problems with the established editions from which the texts were drawn. Brief mention of extant manuscripts that trans- mit each work also accompanies the original. On rare occasions, commentary on the translator’s choices for the English versions is also provided. Borra’s commendably rich selection and reliable translations, in sum, should provide considerable exposure to this long-underappreciated Medieval poet’s oeu- vre, especially among those who care little for the value-added efforts of translators attempting to capture and repackage some element of stylistic effect found in the original and who prefer a more efficient rendition of original works in an interna- tional, modern tongue as a means through which to gain access to the original. In this venture, Borra has succeeded admirably. Coupled with a substantial, though concise, introduction dedicated in part to the modern-day re-evaluation of the poet and his works, this volume does a great service to one of the most impor- tant of Dante’s influences and to Medieval Italian vernacular literature in general, despite the Sommo Poeta’s own disavowal of Guittone’s legacy in the history and evolution of literature in the lingua del sì.

Kevin B. Reynolds York University

Erminia Ardissino. L’umana “Commedia” di Dante. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2016. Pp. 161. ISBN 9788880638469.

L’autrice del saggio L’umana “Commedia” di Dante non intende con la scelta di questo titolo opporsi all’aggettivazione “divina” della Commedia, la quale ben qualifica — sottolinea lei — il poema dantesco. Con l’aggettivazione “umana” la dottoressa Ardissino vuole mettere in risalto l’aspetto profondamente umano presente nelle opere di Dante e in particolare nella Commedia. La forza della sua poesia fa emergere il senso più profondo dell’essere umano, pensiamo al “canto di Ulisse” tratto da Se questo è un uomo di Primo Levi, dedicato all’Ulisse dantesco, uno dei capitoli più intensi e ricchi di umanità della letteratura. I versi di Dante entrano in un campo di concentramento nazista e raggiungono l’uomo Primo Levi riuscendo a portarlo alla sua dimensione più vera di essere umano, recuperando memoria e dignità. La letteratura è forse la strada più completa per la conoscenza di noi stessi, per la vita della nostra coscienza. Con la magia delle parole, delle

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