A new edition of the Cypriot Canzoniere of the sixteenth century has long been a desideratum: the last version of Siapkaras-Pitsillidès's edition is more than forty years old.Footnote 1 In recent years, two new editions have appeared, neither with an apparatus criticus: the one under review here, and one produced by Giovanna Carbonaro in 2012Footnote 2 (which includes a brief Introduction, text with Italian translation, a three-page ‘Nota critica’, list of Italian models of the poems, and Bibliography).
The initial aim of Paschalis M. Kitromilides, editor of the series Sources of Cypriot Literature and History, was a new edition by the late Elsi Mathiopoulou-Tornaritou; as this edition did not materialize, he proceeded with a small compilation of papers by three scholars, which represent successive stages of research on the Canzoniere. K.'s brief Preface (pp. 7-12) highlights the value of the anonymous sixteenth-century anthology of Petrarchan poems from Cyprus, summarizes an unpublished lecture by Mathiopoulou-Tornaritou, and describes how the present book came about. It is followed by another, 40-page paper by Mathiopoulou-Tornaritou (first published in 1993), which serves as an Introduction to the new edition (pp. 15-58). The next part of the book (pp. 59-176) contains the poetic texts. As stated in the Prologue (p. 11), the text of the Canzoniere is mainly based on Siapkaras-Pitsillidès (21975), with ‘most of the corrections which Carbonaro recommends in her own recent revision of the text’, plus ‘a few more corrections’ which are not, however, attributed to any of the authors in the volume. Footnotes to the poems mostly refer to their Italian models, which are presented in a different section of the volume. Between the 156 Cypriot poems and their Italian models (pp. 197-244), we find the ‘Critical note’ by Carbonaro (pp. 177-196), which reproduces (in Greek) the main part of the ‘Introduzione’Footnote 3 and ‘Nota critica’ of her 2012 edition. Carbonaro has also provided the current volume with a Greek glossary, a new feature, since her own edition offered only a translation in Italian, as mentioned above. The glossary is a useful complement: it includes textual references for all the entries, as well as etymological information for a substantial part of them.
The next chapter (pp. 289-323), specially written by Eirini Papadaki for the present volume, is the only new contribution; it offers an overview of the literature on the Cypriot Canzoniere and of future research directions. Papadaki's well-structured and illuminating 35-page chapter deserved to stand as the Introduction to this volume. Mathiopoulou-Tornaritou's undoubtedly rich and significant – but older and quite well-known – paper could have served as a useful Appendix. Papadaki leads the reader through the central topics with clarity and offers insightful information on the manuscript; the poet/s; theories about its origin and formation; the sources and models of the poems; the use of Cypriot dialect; metrics; the practice of translation/adaptation from the Italian, and finally addresses the question of whether the anthology is a Canzoniere or not.
The volume closes with a note on the illustration, a manuscript index and a general index. The absence of a bibliography is notable and regrettable.
The fact that the volume brings together scholarship from various sources, independently written for different purposes, makes it difficult to avoid repetition and overlap. This could have been prevented with more careful editing, especially the similarities in the three papers (all of an introductory character) that discuss aspects of the Canzoniere: this is more than obvious, for instance, in the overlap between the chapters by Papadaki and Carbonaro (pp. 299, 301, 308-9, and 187, 187-8, 182-5 respectively). In addition, repetitions are observed even within the same chapter: the discussion of poem n. 141 (Letter to Manogilis) by Carbonaro on p. 185 is repeated on the next page, and, correspondingly, n. 18 is repeated in n. 25. Inconsistencies in bibliographical references should have been corrected: e.g. Carbonaro's 2012 edition is listed, on pp. 61 and 290, with and without reference to the publisher; in nn. 3, 13, 14 and 29 of Carbonaro's chapter, references to Mathiopoulou's paper use the present volume's page numbers (albeit erroneously), while in n. 20, the page references are to the 1993 version.
To conclude: the volume under review indeed ‘incorporates different layers of research on this emblematic monument of Cyprus's cultural history’ by combining material from previous editions and publications, while Papadaki's chapter ‘represents a step forward’ (p. 11). One cannot deny the usefulness of the undertaking; it is a welcome attempt to make the Cypriot Canzoniere once again accessible to a wider Greek-speaking audience. At the same time, the need for a new critical edition, with a new reading of the manuscript and much-needed commentary on the poems, remains a serious challenge to be met.
