The book, part of the series The Other Voice, is devoted to the poetry of Veronica Gambara, one of the most distinguished voices, as defined by Bembo himself, in Italian Renaissance poetry. Born in 1485, her life spanned the most crucial decades of the making of a literary canon in Italian and, by extension, European poetry. She was also part of a group of female voices that succeeded in conjugating that canon in the plural feminine, so to speak. As a consequence, it is a most welcome opportunity to have her work introduced to and translated for a wide audience, constituted not just by specialists, but also by students and general readers interested in that chapter of European cultural history, even those who may not have mastered Italian fully.

The poems are prefaced by a simple yet informative introduction, which offers the readers useful details about Gambara’s life and cultural and social milieu, as well as her poetry and style. Some notes on her language would also have been useful. The introductory material is completed by a note on the translation, which explains the reasons why the translators opt for a prose translation of her complex and refined verses. The authors explain that they chose to privilege her ideas over the form of her poetry, lest the complexities of her languages shadow the depth of her reasonings.

It is certainly an interesting choice, and it can be argued both that it is highly questionable, considering that the text belongs to a Cinquecento poet — and a very fine one at that — or that it is wise, in view of the fact that the purpose of the endeavor is to introduce a wide public to her verse. Be it as it may, it is certainly rather surprising not to find any account of the publishing history of her poems. We are told that her poems have been rearranged according to a “thematic grouping,” given that it is impossible to date them all and therefore to arrange them chronologically. It may perhaps have been better, however, to have informed the readers as to when and through which channels that poetry met its public originally, as this information does have a profound bearing on the significance the authors attached to it and helps one to appreciate the cultural context into which that poetry was born, read, and did (or did not) influence contemporary writers. Moreover, Gambara writes Petrarchan poetry for which, naturally, the relation of the individual poems to their source(s) — Petrarch’s imagery and language — and the relation of them as a whole to the work they refer to — the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta as a macrostructure — is a key underlying message to the letter of the poems that should not have been overlooked.

Perhaps more questionable still, no mention whatsoever is made of the source (manuscript or otherwise) from which the poems are taken nor of the way in which the text was chosen and edited other than a fleeting mention that the first printed edition of all her poems dates to 1759, and that edits were made to the Italian text in instances in which the grammatical structure of the Italian appeared ambiguous. Apparently to guide such changes the manuscripts sources were used, but which ones they are, where the changes were made, and on what merits remains mysterious.

I found this to be the only major flaw in a work that would have otherwise presented a useful contribution to the scholarship on Gambara and that appears to have been thought of with care and carefully translated (with only one query remaning: why did occhi vaghi, eyes “eager to see,” become “limpid eyes” in poem 34, line 3?). A respect for the text is crucial in any literary undertaking, I feel, and textual criticism is the foundation of it and not a useless, erudite exercise. Because of this careless treatment of the text, an otherwise laudable initiative seems to have reduced fine Cinquecento poetry into a translation workshop.