Abstract

The «Elegia di madonna Fiammetta» has an evident impact of the story of Leandre and Hero, especially in the moments in which the lady suffers while waiting for her lover, who never comes. Fiammetta makes obvious this parallelism on several occasions, and manages to invent an end for the story loaded of pathos. Joan Roís de Corella realises about this relationship between both two works and makes the inverse path: he uses the tone and some narrative elements of the Elegia for writing his Leander and Hero. It is demonstrated that the so contreversial end of Corella’s story is not original of the Valencian, but it also depends on Boccaccio’s text.

Abstract

The well-known Sonnet XIII by Garcilaso de la Vega «A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían» was to establish the disconsolate figure of Apollo, pining for the loss of Daphne, as the literary paradigm of the pangs of love —at least in Renaissance literature in the Iberian peninsula. Thus, a century later, Francesc Fontanella revisited the Garcilaso sonnet and carried out a profoundly Baroque re-reading. The Catalan text ‘transforms’ the symmetry and order in which the Spanish sonnet describes the metamorphosis of the nymph into an inseparable amalgam between the old way of being and the new reality, between the human and the plant, and freezes the figure in mutation: neither the original form nor the results of the process are as interesting as the mutation itself, an idea that conforms to Baroque sensitivities of the aesthetics of transformation. At the same time, the essentially sensory terms of the Renaissance text are transmuted, in the Catalan sonnet, into emotional, human characteristics; the Baroque poet emphasizes Daphne’s intentionality regarding her (almost self-)transformation, and attributes to her an extraordinary willfulness, contrary to Apollo, which is, in the end, to no avail. Finally, Fontanella’s elegiac text breaks with the secular expectations typical of Renaissance sonnets as an emblem of love’s misfortune and instead, rises above them based on the literaturization of the biographical experience.

Abstract

For decades, the figure and works of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (Vienna, 1881-Pe­trópolis, Brazil, 1942) enjoyed the benefit of unparalleled popularity in Catalonia. Beyond praise  and criticism, Zweig, who is arguably one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century, interested and involved writers, artists, critics, translators, politicians, and all sorts of cultural agents in a critique reception of his work in Catalonia which is still to be studied exhaustively and to be interpreted properly. This article proposes a first interpretation of Zweig’s critical reception in Barcelona, which, however anecdotal, episodic and tangential, necessarily reflects the same contradictions and fluctuations of the author’s global reception. From the analysis of his first translations, the relationship with Salvador Dalí, the meeting with Eugeni d’Ors or Joan Estelrich, the repercussions in the press of his death or the debates that his work provoked between idealists and skeptics, some episodes are analyzed that point out major lines of interpretation of Zweig’s work and thought.