Veronica Gambara Complete Poems: A Bilingual Edition ed. by Molly M. Martin and Paola Ugolini (review)

This slender and interesting volume of poems by Veronica Gambara is a welcome addition to the celebrated “The Other Voice” series edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. and now published by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies of the University of Toronto. The publications of this series have done a great deal in making known to the scholarly public the work of women writers who were for long neglected or totally lost in the traditional perspective of male-oriented culture.

Veronica Gambara, daughter of Count Francesco Gambara of Pratalboino and wife of Giberto X, Lord of Correggio, has since her times been considered the personification of the Renaissance high ideal of womanhood: a lady of noble spirit and virtuous femininity, educated in the classics, and proficient in the practice of poetry, a loving wife and mother, wise ruler and administrator of her estate. Such iconic splendor has motivated, throughout the centuries, Gambara’s presence in most anthologies and a number of editions, which is relatively high for a woman; most of these editions were dedicated to her in the nineteenth century, by men of a culture that was very appreciative of the aristocratic ideal of femininity popularized in Europe by the Italian Renaissance. Yet, notwithstanding the century-long applause for the ideal the person Gambara represented, little attention was paid to the woman’s literary output. By providing English readers and scholars with the first complete bilingual edition of her verse, Molly M. Martin and Paola Ugolini have remedied that neglect.

This reviewer’s approval goes first to the translation itself. The editors have wisely chosen to offer a translation attentive to the poet’s ideas, rather than one that tries to imitate the formal aspects of the Italian text. With the necessary syntactical adaptations and transmutations from one linguistic system to another, all translations are fine renderings of the rhythm and the mood of the original poems. The reasons given by the editors for their choice — advanced, among others, by James Saslow for his translation of Michelangelo’s verse — are well articulated in a “Note on the Translation” (33). Given the complexity of the Italian phrasing and the prevailing flatness of the poet’s verse, Martin’s and Ugolini’s translations are commendable for being meaningful and lively. The notes to the texts are useful in providing historical information, frequent comparisons with passages from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and several illuminating references to classical authors, religious and secular.

Gambara’s poetry cannot be dated and presents no remarkable highlights, either from a personal or ideological point of view; her balanced approach and the tactful and graceful manner of her presentation were in fact much valued by her contemporaries and openly praised by a contemporary literary pundit and friend, Pietro Bembo. The editors’ decision, therefore, to organize the poems into a thematic sequence seems appropriate. The readers can progress from thirty poems of love — meant for Gambara’s husband — to four poems of place that celebrate the beauty of her estate, to seventeen poems of correspondence that throw a revealing light on the author’s social connections, to twelve political sonnets, and finally to four “spiritual” sonnets, that is to say, four sonnets of religious content. Separate from the others, as no thematic or generic description is given for it, is a bucolic poem of twenty-seven octaves, with its traditional considerations on the passage of time, the errors of humanity, and the advantages and disadvantages of city and country living. All together, the thematic organization of the poems becomes a useful indication of the poetic personality they embody or, to use a current expression, of the poet’s ever-so-conscious “self-fashioning.” This interesting aspect of Gambara’s persona is dealt with at length in Martin’s introduction.

Gambara was a woman of the smaller northern...