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Reviewed by:
  • Psalteri by Joan Roís de Corella
  • Nancy F. Marino
Roís de Corella, Joan. Psalteri. Edició, estudi introductori i notes de Josep Lluís Martos. Biblioteca d’Autors Valencians 59. Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2013. 361 pp. ISBN: 978-84-7822-644-3

2013 was declared “El Any de Roís de Corella” in Valencia, a collaborative commemoration organized by the Diputació, the Institució Alfons el Magànim, the Catholic University of Valencia, and the University of Valencia. Scholars came together in several venues to share their knowledge of the works of Joan Roís de Corella (1435–1497), considered the last of the great Valencian medieval authors and a transitional figure whose works were a precursor to Renaissance texts in this language. The purpose of the commemoration was to lift the theologian and poet from relative obscurity, as Corella is perhaps the least known of the Valencian poets of this classical era. Studies and editions of his works have recently appeared as a result of this flurry of activity in his honor.

Nevertheless, some scholars have long studied and edited Corella’s texts. One of the most productive among them is Josep Lluís Martos, who has been publishing studies and editions of this author’s prose and poetic works for the last fifteen years. In the present edition he turns his attention to Corella’s translation of the Psalms, which was first published in 1490 in Venice. There are two previous editions of this work. An edició gòtica appeared in 1928, not a facsimile copy [End Page 224] but an imitation of what one might have looked like, a curiosity of little value for study. A transcription of the Venice incunable was published in 1985, but the editors opted to modernize the language for a contemporary reading public. In the introductory remarks to his edition, Martos explains the many errors of transcription of the 1985 version, pointing out as well the various inconsistencies and general lack of rigor in the production of the modern text. The critical edition that he has now produced is the first one available to scholars for serious reading and study. For readability, Martos utilizes the currently accepted regularization of u/v, i/j, and c/ç, as well as the addition of punctuation according to modern usage, but otherwise he leaves the text intact. Perhaps the most notable feature of his edition is his constant comparison of Corella’s syntactic and lexical choices with the Vulgata as well as the 1478 Bibla valenciana’s version of the psalms, with which Corella was demonstrably familiar. These comparisons form the greater part of the footnotes to Martos’s edition, providing an important philological dimension (such as the progress of the Valencian language in the 1400s), as well as an understanding of Corella’s approach to translation.

In his introduction to the edition (9–136), Martos discusses at length the Venice incunable and the extant copies of it, references to a now lost copy, and the production of copies in the nineteenth century. He studies the relationship between Corella’s translation of the Psalms and the version of these texts in the 1478 Valencian Bible and convincingly concludes, as we have seen above, that Corella had this text at hand while he produced his translation. Corella opted for an identical structure and systematization of the psalms, but improved the rubrics to make localization of days and dates more user-friendly than it was in the 1478 publication. Although the two translations of the Psalms are similar in many ways, one of the most salient features of Corella’s version is the “christianizing” of Old Testament sacred songs by the addition of some form of the doctrine of the Trinity that reads in its complete version, “Glòria al Pare e al Fill e al Sant Sperit, axí com era en lo principi e ara, e tostemps hi eternament”.

A bibliography of studies on Joan Roís Corella and his works follows the introduction (137–49). The critical edition of the Psalteri with its extensive annotations is presented on pages150–350, followed by the “Aparat Crític” in which appear the variant...

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