Printing Ausiàs March: Material Culture and Renaissance Poetics by Albert Lloret (review)

Albert Lloret’s Printing Ausiàs March brings to bear a methodological apparatus of bracing diversity on the print afterlife of Valencian poet Ausiàs March (1400–1459), whose renown during his own lifetime and immense influence on early modern poetics throughout Iberia have been noted by many scholars. Although it focuses on the sixteenth century, Lloret’s study largely eschews the effort to further nuance historical appreciation of March as a source for later Iberian poets. Rather, through both traditional and innovative philological techniques, along with a capacious hermeneutics, Lloret examines the entire cultural edifice that produced the two earliest printed editions of March’s works, elucidating the material mechanisms behind March’s influence—and the influence of those very mechanisms on early modern and even contemporary readings of March’s poetry.

Lloret’s study is guided by two complementary convictions articulated in the introduction. The first is that the meaning of texts is “bound to their materiality” (9), and the second, inspired by Donald McKenzie, that “new readers make new texts, and that their meaning is a function of their new form” (9). In light of this latter conviction, the new readers crucial to Lloret’s material poetics are, for the most part, not poets but the translators, printers, and patrons who disseminated March’s poetry toward the middle of the sixteenth century.

The first three chapters of Printing Ausiàs March revolve around Juan Navarro’s 1539 edition of forty-six of March’s 128 poems, accompanied by Baltasar de Romaní’s Castilian translations. Chapter 1 is a close reading of the dedicatory letter to Fernando de Aragon, Duke of Calabria, written by Romaní as a prologue to his translation. Here, Lloret teases out several key points to be addressed in later chapters, the most important of which are that Romaní claims authority only over his translation, and thus not over the edition of the poems in their original Catalan, and that he further claims to have translated the poems “por su mismo estilo” (30–31).

This last claim guides Chapter 2, an examination of Romaní’s “poetics of translation.” Here, Lloret notes, on the one hand, Romaní’s extraordinary effort to maintain the structural features of March’s poetry in his translation, and on the other, the translator’s “vulgarization” of March’s thematic idiosyncrasies. This latter point is crucial to the book’s broader themes: in demonstrating how “Romaní’s vulgarizations of March’s verses often recast original themes along the lines of conventional topics” (44), Lloret traces the production of an edition palatable to a reading public accustomed to the tropes of erotic suffering common in cancionero poetry and sentimental fiction.

Chapter 3 continues to explore the relationship between the Catalan edition and Castilian translation of Navarro’s edition. Here, Lloret begins with a substantial collation of both versions with existing direct witnesses, uncovering small but revealing discrepancies that demonstrate a partial independence of Romaní’s translation from Navarro’s edition. These discrepancies are explained in part through a fascinating excursus on the human labor behind early print, but Lloret eventually concludes that the two versions can nevertheless be taken together as “eccentric witnesses” of the Marchian tradition (64). This eccentricity is explored through an analysis of the choice and organization of March’s poems in Navarro’s edition, which emphasizes the “scientific casuistry” and (as in Romaní’s translation) “sorrowful expression” of a “chaste, spiritual love” (98), suppressing March’s many—and not always condemnatory—references to worldly desire.

Lloret’s final three chapters are dedicated to Carles Amorós’s 1543 edition of March’s works, which contains 122 of March’s poems and thus aspires to be comprehensive. Chapter 4 is a biography of the sponsor of Amorós’s edition, Ferrando de Cardona, the Duke of Somma and Admiral of Naples. Through this biography, Lloret portrays a literary milieu in Barcelona that...