Sweet Fire: Tullia D'Aragona's Poetry of Dialogue and Selected Prose.

Jones, Ann Rosalind

Tullia d'Aragona. Sweet Fire: Tullia D'Aragona's Poetry of Dialogue and Selected Prose.

Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Pallitto. New York: George Braziller, 2006. 128 pp. index. bibl. $15.95. ISBN: 978-0-8076-1562-1.

Chiara Matraini. Selected Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Ed. and trans. Elaine Maclachlan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. xxx + 275 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. $24. ISBN 978-0226-51085-9.

Both of these editions and translations of sixteenth-century women poets present their poems in a bilingual format, include translations of some of their prose work, and are usefully framed by biographical and interpretive material. A striking difference between Tullia and Matraini, however, lies in what might be called the shared ownership of Tullia's Rime and Matraini's much greater authorial possession of the texts she produced over a fifty-year writing career.

Elizabeth Pallitto's translation of Tullia's Rime (Venice, 1547, 1549, 1560) presents her small poetic oeuvre (thirty-eight poems), mainly sonnets addressed to family members of Duke Cosimo de' Medici and to literary men active in Florentine cultural circles. The identifications of these addressees, a detailed set of footnotes to the poems, and a carefully researched introduction provide a useful framework. Pallitto's translations are graceful and ingenious: she works out precise or slant rhymes corresponding to Tullia's rhyme schemes, often with admirable faithfulness to the originals. Even in the twelve sonnets by Tullai's male acquaintances, which were paired with her sonnets in the second and third section of the book, Pallitto frequently captures the verse forms.

But she understandably omits a substantial part of the collection as a whole, poems not written by Tullia: the eclogue by Girolamo Muzio that occupies the fourth section of the book and the fifty-five sonnets written by men collected in the fifth. The final impression the Rime makes is that Tullia was considerably outwritten by her interlocutors. Pallitto's concluding translations from four prose passages show the same thing. Three are by Muzio: his dedication to his own eclogue in the Rime, his preface to Tullia's Dialogo de l'infinita di amor, in which he praises his own role in bringing the text into print, and his letter to Antonio Mezzabarba offering him a history and interpretation of his own eclogue. Only the fourth passage was written by Tullia, her preface to her epic, Il Meschino Guerrino. This emphasis on Muzio's authorship is in no way Pallitto's creation; rather. it invites her readers to recognize the degree to which Tullia's visibility depended on cooperation with the male intellectuals in her milieu, whose writing dominates almost two-thirds of her collection. The Rime was a creation of many writers. among whom Tullia was the only woman. Her later, single-authored writings have now been made available in Rinaldina Russell's translation of her dialogue and, more recently, Julia Hairston and John McLucas's translation of her epic, which they entitle The Wretch, Otherwise Known as Guerrino, both in The Other Voice series from The University of Chicago Press. Yet Tullia's lyrics first brought her into view as a consequence of the focus on poetry in anthologies from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth, and Pallitto's translation is now doing the same for modern readers of English.

Chiara Matraini was a writer of amore familiar kind: the single composer of poems, letters, and meditations all published under her own name. Giovanna Rabitti, who published an Italian edition of Matraini's poems and letters in 1989, introduces (thanks to a translation into English by Natalia Costow-Zalcssow) the long history of the poet's career, centered in Lucca, including poems first published in 1555 and substantially revised in 1595 and 1597; letters, first published in 1555 and much expanded in 1595; spiritual meditations, first published in 1581; and, written in her early seventies, a massive set of meditations and sonnets on the Penitential Psalms and a prose discourse on the Virgin Mary. Given such a vast oeuvre, Maclachlan necessarily translates a limited selection: about half the lyrics, usually set in a smooth tetrameter, and a small sample of the prose works. But the evolution of Matraini's career is clear: from sonnets to a beloved man - Bartolomeo Graziani, probably murdered by his brother-in-law after living openly with the widowed Matraini - and then focused on his afterlife in heaven (the model of Vittoria Colonna is relevant here) through increasingly religious poems and, after a thirty year silence, the religious prose works. One of the most striking elements of this collection, and an obvious contrast to Tullia's, is the frequency with which Matraini addressed women, among them her friend Cangenna Lipomini, the recent widow Batina Centurione, and her cousin, Juditta Matraini, the abbess of a Pisan monastery. Another is the clarity with which Matraini's revisions of her poems come through in Rabitti's careful presentation of changes in each succeeding printing: a history of Matraini's thought and sense of an audience emerges from the comparison this organization makes possible. The book also makes clear the range of genres of which Matraini was capable.

Taken together, the two books illustrate the extreme differences in women's writing in the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth. Tullia's resolutely secular courtship of literary men sets her work dramatically apart from Matraini's transformations of her focus in her later work in response to the demand for spiritual advice as the Counter-Reformation reshaped readers' needs. This general history is well-known, but the details of its effects in Matraini;s l ong career are fascinating, and Rabitti;s presentation is impressive for its caution in separating the gossip surrounding Maraini's life in Lucca and conjectures about the writer's motives from the evidence of her ambitions directly offered by the texts themselves. Pallitco's introduction ends with a too-fanciful suggestion that Tullia's single sonnet to Bernardino Ochino inspired the Salmo painted by Moretto and assumed to have Tullia as its subject; why would whoever commissioned the portrait want to focus the painter's implied allusion to John the Baptist on such a particular detail of Tullia's sequence? Rabitti's long research on Matraini's life and five decades of literary activity, however, has provided an authoritative framework for understanding how this intelligent and persistent woman fitted herself into a shifting sets of genres and the expectations of readers of both sexes.

ANN ROSALIND JONES

Smith College