Variación y testimonio único: La reescritura de la poesía ed. by Josep Lluís Martos (review)

Variación y testimonio único: La reescritura de la poesía is a collection of studies by specialized scholars that seeks to identify the cultural and artistic conditions that lead to the transmission and "variación" of poetic texts. To achieve this goal, these seasoned philologists look into the editorial mechanism and processes (ecdótica) that set the conditions for variations of the cultural material (the text) to occur. Editorial or scribal errors, manuscript deterioration, editors' attempts to correct errors, and the rewriting of a given poem by the poet himself are among some of the causes that result in literary variations. This monograph, therefore, goes beyond the critical analysis of texts, although it is a significant component of it. The collection offers the reader a glimpse into the human craftsmanship that underlies the creation and reproduction of the cultural object in a printing press, which, in turn, allows us to understand how and why traditional romances evolved over time.

Spanish traditional poetry, of which the romance is its most representative genre, has been at the center of sundry studies from medieval and Renaissance scholars. Ramón Menéndez Pidal has established a difference between artistic poetry and traditional poetry. Whereas the former normally comes from a fixed archetype to which the reader must refer back, the latter exists in multiple versions, variations, and sometimes refundiciones (recasts). Diego Catalán demarcates the terminology employed to designate the changes and motifs that ensue from a given romance ("variante," "versión," and "variación"). Catalán prefers the use of the term "variación," which he defines as "todo detalle variable, sea un elemento narrativo o un simple giro de expresión, característico de una serie de versiones y desconocido de otras" ("El 'motivo' y la 'variación' en la trasmisión tradicional del romancero" Bulletin hispanique 61.2 (1959): 149–82, [p. 150]). Like Catalán, Josep Lluís Martos and the collaborators of this monograph favor the employment of the term "variación" to refer to the same literary phenomenon.

The book contains 18 studies, one of which is a brief introductory note where the editor outlines the scope of the collection. The text can be roughly categorized into three groups that refer back to its title: (1) studies on texts of testimonio único, (2) processes of variation and ecdótica, and (3) Martos's study, which focuses on rhyming structures and ecdótica in Corellas's "mal editats" poems Sotsmissió amorosa. Martos, who provides hermeneutic tools that can be transferable to examine the works of other poets, shows not only Corellas's deployment of rhyming schemes and patterns to enhance the aesthetic effects of his poems, but also the literary tradition from which his technique stems.

Fabio Barberini begins the series of testimonios únicos with a study of cantiga 180, which appears in the Galician-Portuguese Cancioneiro da Ajuda. Barberini centers his attention on three main topics to attempt a reconstruction and interpretation of the cantiga: (1) the possibility that a later editor added two verses to cobra II, (2) the scribe's and the decorator's roles and oversights in the manufacture of the cantiga, and (3) the likelihood that the first stanza of the poem was in folio 45, now lost, which compels the scribe to treat the two-verse refram in folio 46 as the introductory stanza. Patrizia Botta and Aviva Garribba focus on four romances written in Rome by Spanish-speaking poets, underscoring the cultural and linguistic contexts in which these poems were composed. Giuseppe Di Stefano looks into Jerónimo Pinar's romances, paying particular attention to two variations of some of his poems that survive in Cancionero General and Cancionero de Londres. Ana M. Rodado Ruiz studies Manuscript SA10a, which contains 51 single testimonies. Coupled with her analysis of this poetic cluster, Rodado Ruiz examines the...