Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation by Jennifer Rushworth (review)

Jennifer Rushworth's analysis of the afterlives of Petrarch's writings in nineteenth-century France is extensively researched and well constructed. This bipartite work in reception studies has Petrarch's texts in Italian and Latin as its foundation: the first half focuses on complete and partial translations into French; the second half concerns French poems and novels that amount to rewritings of ideas and style. Two highlights are Chapter 4, which analyses the complexities of Avignonese interactions with Petrarch's legacy around the time of major anniversaries, and Chapter 6, in which texts from 1761 to 1854 are explored as romans pétrarquistes, including Balzac's Le Lys dans la vallée, Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme, and George Sand's Adriani. From the outset, inspired by theorizations such as Clive Scott's Translating Baudelaire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), Rushworth is deft in considering translation as a creative transformation at the level of content and technique. Throughout the book, wide-ranging discussions incorporate works from the long nineteenth century by canonical and lesser-known figures, such as the abbé de Sade, Lamartine, and Emma Mahul, whose translations of Petrarch's sonnets were published in five editions between 1847 and 1877. Medievalist, Italophilic, and Romantic trends are judiciously identified as contributing to the popularity of certain writings as sources for translations and creative works, not least the 126th poem of the Canzoniere related to the Fontaine de Vaucluse, or sonnets describing love for Laura in life and death. The impact of a translator's agency comes to the fore in 'a process of refinement, curation, and selection for a specifically French public' (p. 33) that was as much about paratextual material as a choice of poems. Petrarch's writings emerge as 'ripe for bold amendments' (p. 76) in the hands of authors who repeatedly chopped and changed elements to suit agendas that were frequently at odds with the spirit of the original, as in the case of re-arranging and removing sonnets to construct a narrative of unceasing love for Laura. Particularly intriguing are volumes in which translations of Petrarch's works are juxtaposed with poems by the translator, including Léonce de Saint-Geniès's Poésies de Pétrarque of 1816: 'poetry and translation […] are seen to be complementary and to overlap, so much so that the distinction between translation and creative writing becomes unstable' (p. 139). Ultimately, in the tug-of-war over the poet and his patria, emotional and linguistic affinities are shown to be at least as significant as physical geography: 'Petrarch is […] peculiarly open to adoption at points of nation-building and the formation of national culture, because of his contradictory, protean, and nomadic nature' (p. 251). The closing pages are devoted to two appendices covering translations from 1756 to 1903, a three-part bibliography, and an index of essential terms and proper nouns.