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  • Mount Canigó. A Tale of Catalonia by Jacint Verdaguer
  • Helena Buffery
Verdaguer, Jacint. Mount Canigó. A Tale of Catalonia, introduction and translation by Ronald Puppo. Barcelona; Woodbridge: Editorial Barcino-Tamesis, 2015. 236 pp. ISBN: 978-18-5566-298-8.

Ronald Puppo's translation of Jacint Verdaguer's Canigó is a work of immense ambition and painstaking care and attention that, as we learn from his introduction, was nothing less than a labour of love spanning almost two decades. Building on his highly acclaimed anthology of Verdaguer's poems (Selected Poems of Jacint Verdaguer, 2007), which included excerpts from the nineteenth-century Catalan poet's second epic masterpiece, including the elegiac voice of "The Two Bell-towers", the project to translate a narrative poem of such thematic, linguistic and rhythmic complexity brings together the influence and expertise of some of the foremost translators and scholars who have engaged in the dissemination of Catalonia's distinguished literary legacy, from Arthur Terry, with his salutary advice to forego any temptation towards an archaising translation, to Peter Bush, who read and reviewed the completed version. As it is also patent from the introduction, the translation process was underpinned by meticulous research, ranging across the biography and social context of Verdaguer, the most important critical analyses of his Catalan Renaixença epic, and [End Page 168] the poem's translation and reception history. Indeed, Puppo offers an invaluable contextualization of Verdaguer's work, painting a vivid picture of why it might have received such acclaim in the Europe of his time, but above all highlighting its central place in the revival of Catalan literary culture and in underpinning a sense of the singularity of Catalan identity.

Completed in 1886, Canigó had been preceded by another narrative poem, L'Atlàntida, whose imaginative juxtaposition of mythical and historical temporalities to place in parallel the legend of Atlantis and Columbus's voyage to the Americas, was a major event on the Catalan literary scene, inaugurating a step change in the primarily lyrical and nostalgic tenor of the poetry of the Jocs Florals in its ambition to enter into dialogue with the classics of the Medieval period. It also provided the first nineteenth-century epic poem in the Iberian context that could compete with other such trends in world literature, from the contributions of the Romantics, such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Childe Harold and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to Longfellow's Hiawatha and Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Canigó signalled the desire to perform the same alchemical process for Catalonia, and led its poet to range across a wide range of different fields and intertexts, from the medieval historiography that was being pieced together by figures like Víctor Balaguer to the popular poetry and legendary tales gathered by contemporary folklorists, alongside a wide range of Biblical and literary materials. A compendium of the knowledge that was being collected and assembled by Catalans of the time, the poem also drew closely on its author's own intimate knowledge of the Pyrenees, fed by his enthusiasm for hill walking and mountaineering over the previous decade—that passion for excursionisme shared with many of his contemporaries. Indeed, it is perhaps this intimacy with the landscape that is most effectively transmitted through the translation, as an after-image of Puppo's own process of encounter with the poem through curiosity about the legends of Mount Canigó, a symbol of Catalonia's past grandeur that continues to inspire artists north and south of the French border.

Puppo draws on a range of different intertexts to transmit the formal variety of Verdaguer's poem, including Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the work of Longfellow and Tennyson, English Romantic poetry, and translations of French and Italian epic cycles. This is a bold and audacious approach that is nevertheless necessary to give a sense of the formal experimentation at the heart of Verdaguer's work and to finally place him alongside his literary peers, not only as a late-comer to the epic revival of the Romantic period but as a poet who places his own distinctive stamp on this tradition, for which he deserves to be...

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