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

That Petrarch was essential to Renaissance literature and culture is beyond doubt, and the amount of studies dedicated to Petrarchism in France is a tangible proof. The medievalism of the nineteenth-century French Romantic movement is also a well-established topic. However, the nineteenth-century interest in Petrarch is less explored. It is this gap in the scholarship that Jennifer Rushworth proposes to fill with her study Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France. She claims in the introduction that the period under consideration is a "similarly fertile Petrarchan moment" (4) compared to the sixteenth century. Not only does she quantitatively demonstrate the important presence of Petrarch in nineteenth-century France, she also analyzes "the specifically French motivation behind the reception of Petrarch" (2). The creation of the "French Petrarch" and "Provençal / Avignonese Petrarch" (after the town of Avignon that presented particular claims on the poet), and particularly the strategies and motives of this creation are at the core of her monograph.

The book is divided into two parts, "Translations" and "Rewritings." The study is complemented by two appendixes. Appendix 1 provides an annotated chronological survey of the French translations of the Canzoniere and Triumphi between 1764 and 1903. Appendix 2 gives full texts of translations into French of the opening stanza of RVF 126 (Chiare, fresche et dolci acque)—one of the most popular by Petrarch in nineteenth-century France, as discussed in the study—in chronological order from Voltaire (1756) to Brisset (1903).

Part I consists of four chapters dedicated to various translations of Petrarch into French and, occasionally, Occitan. Rushworth specifies that she is "less concerned with directly comparing original and translated text" (33–34) not only because such comparisons immediately present translation as inferior to the original, but also, in keeping with her objective to see Petrarch from the perspective of the nineteenth-century reader, because only rarely was the Italian original given in the French versions and thus "direct comparison […] was typically neither encouraged nor facilitated" (34). What interests her instead are the choices made by the translators. These choices include titles and order of poems in the case of complete translations and the poems selected for translation in the case of partial translations. Ultimately, Rushworth aims to understand what image of Petrarch was constructed through all these choices.

Chapter 1 presents a detailed survey of five complete translations produced at the time and demonstrates how the form and style of each reflected the translator's motivation as explained in the prefaces to the translations. Chapter 2 traces the cementing of the image of Petrarch as "a love poet and author of sonnets" (51) through the choice of the poems for translations, reordering the selected poems, and approaches to translation. Rushworth demonstrates that if in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century translations were freer and privileged happier poems, translations later in the century reflect Romanticism's preference for mourning and an even greater interest in Petrarch solely as a sonneteer. But all approaches illustrate the distaste for and avoidance of Petrarch's original wordplay, mythological references, and religious framework. Chapter 3 complements the first two by insisting that Petrarch's Latin works were mostly read for autobiographical information. Consequently, in the earlier part of the century the translators were interested in them "only insofar as they were relevant to Petrarch's love for Laura" (101). Although later in the century these works "were promoted as masterpieces of sincerity and self-reflection" (102), the selective interest in the Latin compositions confirms that for the nineteenth-century French audience, Petrarch was "above all, the amorous poet of Laura's life and death" (107).

Chapter 4 delves into the challenge faced by the translators and writers of the period of reconciling their attempts to create the French Petrarch and the poet's own dislike of Avignon. The chapter explores the fate of three sonnets from the...