Albert Lloret

The letter and the fading voice in the poetry of Ausiàs March

ABSTRACT The poetry of medieval Valencian author Ausiàs March (1400–59) has been thoroughly examined in recent years with attention to its material transmission. Emphasis on the relationship between both manuscript and print culture and the interpretation of March’s verses, however, has tended to sidestep their original conditions of production and reception. In the present essay, I argue first for the need to think of March’s work in terms of oral dissemination. Next, I theorize the kind of space constructed for, and arising from, late medieval lyric poems conceived for oral performance. Finally, to illustrate the kind of hermeneutics required by these material conditions of existence, I examine the notion of closeness as a framework for understanding selected passages of March’s poetry, with a focus on the Llir entre cards cycle.

Catalan Literature and Translation

In the beginning was translation. The earliest extant works in the oldest form of Catalan were translations from Latin. There are slightly older attestations of this Romance language disseminated in a predominantly Latin legal record, but none of a range comparable to the remaining fragments of the Llibre jutge, the two twelfth-century partial translations of a seventh-century Visigothic set of laws.1 The Llibre jutge sits beyond the boundaries of what ourmodernworld calls literary. But other nearly coeval works, when observed from the present, hold curious narrative qualities and display familiar literary devices. For example, Les homilies d’Organyà, a collection of sermons containing an early thirteenth-century Catalan version of an Occitan homily, is perhaps the oldest known translation between two Romance languages.2 The late middle ages kept yielding scores of Catalan versions of historical, philosophical, and literary works originally written in Latin and other Romance languages. These translations speak volumes of the position of the Crown of Aragon in the cultural dynamics of premodern Europe.3 There were Catalan renderings of Petrarch’s Africa (the first translation into a vernacular language), Boccaccio’s Decameron, Dante’s Commedia (the earliest verse translation), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroids, Sallust’s Iugurthinum War, Seneca’s Tragedies, Cicero’s On Duties and Paradoxes, and Livy’s History of Rome, among many others surviving or now lost.4 Translations into Catalan often served as intermediary texts from which other medieval Castilian or Aragonese re-translations were made. Furthermore, in the late Middle Ages and early modernity, works in Catalan by Ramon Llull, Ausiàs March, and JoanotMartorell began to be available in the closest neighboring tongues, be it Castilian, French, Occitan, or Latin, which for a few centuries was the language of the highest intellectual and poetic prestige.5 It may be argued that the prominence given to the oldest Catalan texts is themere result of a series of accidents in the survival of this language’s earliest written record, but one should also concede that no early history of a language can be conceived in less contingent terms. My reference to the origins of the Catalan language in relation to translation is also determined, as any other historical perspective, by the endearments and anxieties of the observer. I do not fail to remark that Catalan—a language presently ranked within the top eighty in number of speakers—is, nonetheless, the twentieth most translated and the twenty-seventh most popular target language in UNESCO’s Index Translationum charts.6 These raw figures include all translated works—literary or otherwise—but translation obviously remains key in the Catalan literary system. The history ofmodern Catalan translation has come a longway from the occasional versions of Molière, Corneille, and Racine, which appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century in Menorca and the Rousillon; from Joan Maragall’s fascination with German literature; from the series of translations published in the newspaper La Renaixensa’s (1892–1902) feuilleton section; to the Biblioteca Popular de l’Avenç translation series (1903–15); Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Shakespeare; the ongoing Col·lecció BernatMetge of classical Latin and Greek (founded in 1923);