Original scientific paper
Sabo Bobaljević and the Translation of his Italian Verses
Smiljka Malinar
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The Dubrovnik poet Savino de’ Bobali Sordo (Sabo Babaljević Glušac) left in all 16
compositions written in Croatian and 254 poems in Italian. This disproportion should
perhaps be ascribed to the manuscript form of transmission of Bobaljević’s Croatian
verses (which could be the vestiges of a much larger oeuvre that has been lost in the
meantime), whereas the Italian verses have been preserved in printed form. Their
posthumous publication in Venice in 1584 under the title Rime amorose, e pastorali, et
satire was facilitated by the poet’s brothers and rich relative Marin Bobaljević. There
is no doubt that Bobaljević, member of the local Accademia dei Concordi, was primarily
occupied with writing verses in Italian that were, in most of his works, fully at
one with the stylistic standards of Bembo’s Petrarchism, then the dominant trend in
the sphere of elevated poetry. The Croatian verses are heterogeneous in form and in
terms of themes, and give the impression of being the outcome of experimentation.
In them the Petrarchism remodelled by Bembo has left almost no trace whatsoever;
the only composition that might be referred to the influence of the Bembo aesthetic
is contaminated by stylisation into the vernacular idiom. Most of the other, with
their formalist mannerism of Provencal and late Latin derivation take us back to the
archaic, strambotto version of Petrarchism, the status of which in Bobaljević’s time and
in Dubrovnik was questionable (a conclusion that the poet himself suggests in some
of his verses). Hence they are closer, for example, to the Nikša Ranjina miscellany
than to the Bobaljević Italian collection, and its fluent, musical verses, which with
untroubled ease interweave the motifs and formal assemblages characteristic of the
then Petrarchan mainstream; the occasional innovations are an echo of the “outgrowing”
of the canonical Petrarchist forms by the generation of poets contemporary
with him. An exception is the segment of satires and epistles, derived from the same
archetypal pattern.
The paper adduces in broad lines the features of the translation of Bobaljević’s verses
into Croatian by Frano Čale, published in the edition Pjesme talijanke (Italian Poems).
Čale has with a very careful selection composed a corpus of Bobaljević’s best poems
that – if they are the most acceptable for the present-day reader – give a somewhat untruthful picture of his poetic attainments, for his Italian oeuvre as a whole shows
him to be much more mediocre and conventional than he appears in the idealised
image given by Čale and other authors who have concerned themselves with his
verses – Milica Popović, Đuro Körbler and Arrigo Zink (the last two raised the question
of Bobaljević’s place within Italian and/or Croatian literature).
Keywords
Sabo Bobaljević Glušac; Pietro Bembo; Frano Čale; Italian original; Croatian translation; Bemboist Petrarchism; strambotic Petrarchism
Hrčak ID:
61570
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2010.
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