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Autor and tratado in the fifteenth century: semantic latinism or etymological trap?

1982; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382822000359211

1469-3550

Keith Whinnom,

Medieval European Literature and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: SENTIMENTAL ROMANCE/SENTIMENTAL NOVELSPAIN — LANGUAGES — SPANISH LANGUAGE & ITS HISTORY — MEDIEVAL PERIOD Notes 1. For bibliographical references and sundry incontestable examples of semantic latinism see Manuel Alvar and Sebastián Mariner, ‘Latinismos’, in ELH, II (Madrid 1967), 3–49, esp. §28, 25–26. 2. Both examples occur in San Pedro's verse panegyric of Isabella; see Diego de San Pedro, Obras completas. I: Traclado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda; Sermón, ed. Keith Whinnom (Madrid 1973), 97. 3. See Jean-Paul Lecertua, ‘L' Estoria de dos amantes, Eurialo y Lucrecia: Traduction espagnole de la Historia de duobus (se) amantibus (1444), d'Acneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pie II)’, TRAMES: Etudes Ibériques, I (1975), 1–78. It should be noted that Lecertua collates his Spanish with the Latin text of the Opera omnia of Basle 1571, and that it is probable that the translator used a much more corrupt text; there must remain, nevertheless, a substantial residue of plain mistranslations. See also my ‘The Historia de duobus amantibus of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) and the development of Spanish Golden-Age fiction’, in the forthcoming homage-volume to Frank Pierce, edited by R. B. Tate. 4. Servius Honoratus, Ad Vergilium, ad XII, 159. There are innumerable editions from the fifteenth century on; I have used the Teubner Classics text, Servii Grammatiei qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentant, ed. Georg Titilo and Hermann Hagen, 3 vols (Leipzig 1878–1902), in which the note referred to may be found in vol. II. Probus, in Grammatici latini, ed. Heinrich Keil, 8 vols (Leipzig 1855–80), 1452. 5. M.-D. Chenu, ‘Auctor, actor, autor’, Bulletin Du Cange: Archivum I.atinitatis Medii Aevi, III (1927), 81–86. 6. Joseph F. Chorpenning, ‘Rhetoric and feminism in the Cárcel de Amor , BHS, LIV (1977), 1–8, at p. 4. 7. Barbara F. Weissberger, ‘ “Habla el auctor”: L'Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta as a source for the Siervo libre de amor’ JHP, IV ( 1979–80), 203–36, at pp. 214 and 205. She also quotes with approval (212) the observation of Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of ‘La Celestina ’ (Princeton 1972), 52, that when Rojas prefaces his closing verses with the rubric ‘Habla el auctor’, he does so to indicate to his audience that ‘in this role he will provide briefly the standard piety, the mention of Christ, and the moral admonishment that are so conspicuously lacking in Pleberio's lament’. 8. José Luis Gotor, ‘A propósito de las Coplas de Vita Christi de Fray Iñigo de Mendoza’, in Studi Ispanici (Pisa 1979), 173–214, points out that the proliferation of such rubrics, even in manuscripts, is a late phenomenon: ‘antes de la imprenta no existe esa conciencia textual’ (184, n.10). 9. Sec, for instance, Tractatus Garsiae; or, The Translation of the Relics of SS. Gold and Silver, ed. Rodney M. Thomson (Leyden 1973), which is, simultaneously, all three. On this work see María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, ‘La Garcineida de García de Toledo’, NRFH, VII (1953), 246–58, and Francisco Rico, ‘Las letras latinas del siglo XII en Galicia, León y Castilla’, in Ábaco 2 (Madrid 1969), 9–92, at pp. 42–50. It should be noted that, while ‘tractatus’ appears in Thomson's base manuscript, it is not used in all. 10. See the rhetoricians cited by Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (Munich 1960), translated by José Pérez Rieseo as Manual de retórica literaria: Fundamentos de una ciencia de la literatura, 3 vols (Madrid 1966), especially §§408 and 854. 11. Anna Krause, ‘El “tractado” novelístico de Diego de San Pedro’, BHi, LIV (1952), 242–75. The article-repeats and amplifies pp. 29–32 of her dissertation, ‘La novela sentimental española, 1440–1513’, University of Chicago 1928. 12. Carmelo Samonà, Studi sul romanzo sentimentale e cortese nella letteratura spagnola del Quattrocento (Rome 1960), 42, n. 50: ‘nulla ci autorizza a pensare che il valore di quel termine tractatus vada oltre la lusinga di una qualifica dottrinale, in cui si è ridotto a etichetta il senso dell'originario tractatus latino-medievale’. Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘Don Quixote: story or history?’ MPh, LXIII (1965), 1–11, p. 1. 13. Armando Duran, Estructura y técnicas de la novela sentimental y caballeresca (Madrid 1973). 14. Dinko CvitanoviČ, ‘El tratadismo en Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’, Cuadernos del Sur, 11 (1969), 25–36, and La novela sentimental española (Madrid 1973), esp. 63–80. 15. Chorpenning, art. cit.; Weissberger, 206, 207, and 209. She refers to my introduction to San Pedro, Obras completas. II: Cárcel de Amor (Madrid 1971), 47–48; but see also my Diego de San Pedro (New York 1974), 145, and my translation, Diego de San Pedro, ‘Prison of Love’ (1492) together with the Continuation by Nicolás Núñez (1496) (Edinburgh 1979), 101. In Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Siervo libre de amor (Madrid 1976), the editor, Antonio Prieto, explains tratado (65, n. 2) as ‘discurso largo’. 16. Sec my ‘Nicolás Núñez's continuation of the Cárcel de Amor (Burgos, 1496)’, in Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age Presented to Edward M. Wilson, ed. R. O. Jones (London 1973), 357–66. 17. Professor Wardropper, in a private communication commenting on my Prison of Love, objected to my translation oí autor as ‘narrator’, on the grounds that it closes down an option and removes an ambiguity which it is important to preserve. It is an argument which has some force. Weissberger would also, no doubt, dispute my suppression of a piece of linguistic evidence, since she argues as follows: ‘What we have in the Cárcel de Amor, then, is a curious desdoblamiento—an auctor without auctoritas. The phenomenon would be impossible, it seems to me, if “auctor” in 1492 did not retain most or all of its traditional etymological weight’ (214). 18. The variant actor, the least frequent of the forms, is probably a straightforward borrowing from Classical Latin; while it could not be a Spanish phonetic development from auctor, it might also be explained as a hypercorrection of autor (cf. acto/auto). Gotor suggests that there may be a difference between ‘el autor como narrador y actor como referente de autoridades’ (184); but even though certain rubrics in Mendoza's Vita Christi appear to lend some support to this interpretation, such a distinction docs not seem to have been generalized. In general, and despite Weissberger (209–10), in narrative religious verse (Mendoza, San Pedro, etc.), the ‘autor’ rubrics signal precisely the passages which lack biblical authority and indicate that the poet is providing his own gloss. 19. The cases of sabio and filósofo seem to be clear enough, so that it is pointless to cite references; but estoriador and orador might repay more detailed investigation, since, not altogether appropriately one might think, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán calls Enrique de Villena an estoriador (Generacionesy semblanzas, ed. R. B. Tate [London 1965], 33) and Rojas calls Petrarch an orador (prologue to the Tragicomedia). Francisco Rico, prologue to Joan Roís de Corella, Tragedia de Caldesa i altres proses, ed. Marina Gustà (Barcelona 1980), 18, argues that orador is precisely equivalent to the later humanista. 20. See the acrostic verses, Comedia version: ‘oí su inventor ser ciente’ (Tragicomedia, ‘inventarla persona prudente’). Quintilian repeatedly uses inventor (e.g. 3, 7, 18) as a synonym for auctor, while inventio (Cicero, Quintilian, Rhetorica ad Herennium, etc.) is a standard rhetorical term (see Lausberg, §§260–442) which might be translated as ‘creative imagination’, even though the manuals describe mechanical methods to assist ‘invention’. 21. In Libro de los estados, ed. R. B. Tate and I. R. Macpherson (Oxford 1974), 65, obrador, applied to God, is clearly ‘creator’; but in El conde Lucanor, ed. Hermann Knust (Leipzig 1900), 268, it means ‘writer’. 22. Rodríguez del Padrón refers to his ‘poético fin’ (68); Rojas (prologue to the Tragicomedia) calls Petrarch a ‘poeta’, although it is evident that he knew only Petrarch's prose; the author of Fiammetta is advertised in the editions of the Spanish translation as a ‘poeta’ (see n. 29 below); the anonymous author of Gracisla says that it would take a greater ‘poeta’ than himself adequately to describe the festivities: see my Dos opúsculos isabelinos: ‘La coronación de la señora Gracisla ‘ (BN Ms. 22020) y Nicolás Núñez, ‘Cárcel de Amor’ (Exeter 1979), 5; and even Alemán refers to Guzmán de Alfarache's ‘poética historia’. In other writers, however (e.g. Juan Manuel, Santillana), poeta does seem to mean ‘poet’. Note that poema is not documented in Spanish before the seventeenth century (Corominas, s.v. poeta). 23. Amadís de Gaula, ed. Edwin B. Place, I (Madrid 1959), 9. The use of escritor for ‘copyist’ must be linked with the shift of escribano to ‘lawyer's clerk’, ‘notary’, but it is not easy to attach dates to these changes. Escritor, of course, regains the sense of ‘writer’ in the course of the sixteenth century (cf. La comedia thebaida, Segura's Processo de cartas, etc.). 24. Weissberger, 209; it should be noted that she is advancing a hypothetical argument with which, for quite different reasons, she does not concur. 25. I have used the concordance to the works of Berceo prepared by Professor Brian Dutton, which should shortly be available on microfiches. 26. See, passim, Cuentas de Gonzalo de Baeza, tesorero de Isabel la Católica, ed. Antonio and E. de la Torre, 2 vols (Madrid 1955–56). 27. Contrast the earlier Cuento de Tristán de Leonís, MS Vaticana 6.428, and see below my remarks on cuento. 28. Juan Gracián, the printer, contributed a preface to the work; see Historia etiópica de los amores de Teágenesy Cariclea traducida en romance por Fernando de Mena, ed. Francisco López Estrada (Madrid 1954), 10. 29. Salamanca 1497: La Fiometa [sic] de Juan Vocació; on the verso of the title-page we read: ‘Aqui comienza el libro intitulado Fiameta compuesto por Juan Vocacio poeta florentino. El qual libro es partido en nueue capitulos o mas verdaderamente nueue partes’. Seville 1523 has for its title: Libro llamado Fiameta porque trata de los amores duna notable napolitana llamada Fiameta. El qual libro compuso el famoso Juan Vocacio poeta florentin. 30. Nebrija, Lexicon ex sermone latino in hispaniensem (Salamanca 1492); the term remains extremely rare throughout the sixteenth century. 31. Professor Roger M. Walker has supplied me with copies of his detailed notes on narrative formulae employed in El libro del cavallero Zifar. ‘cuenta la estoria’ occurs 4 times, ‘dize la escriptura’ 16, and ‘dize el cuento’ 33. The later aversion to cuento, while obviously only a temporary phenomenon, does not appear to have been noticed previously, and is not easy to explain. 32. I have relied primarily on Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts (Literary Texts), 2nd edn, compiled by Anthony Cárdenas, Jean Gilkison, John Nitti, and Ellen Anderson (Madison 1977); note, however, that it is essential to check the STIT (specific title) of works listed in the index by their GTIT (general title: ‘the title by which the work is generally known’). Sec below my remarks on tratado in titles. J.-P. Lecertua argues (16, 16a, 16b) that estoria also implies didactic purpose, but relics on early fourteenth-century testimony (in fact Don Juan Manuel) to support his contention. 33. We may ignore the old sense of picture’, but Alan Deyermond points out to me that, soon after 1450, estoria (‘la estoria deste santo apóstol’) is used for II Corinthians by Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos; Admiración operum Dei, ed. Lewis J. Hutton [BRAE anejo 16] (Madrid 1967), 62. 34. BOOST (see n. 32) lists 77 MSS or editions under the GTIT of Tratado, but reference to the STITs shows that almost half of these titles are ‘unavailable’, and that for those available and assignable to the second half of the fifteenth century, only half arc genuine tratados. The works I have mentioned are numbers 1849, 1481, 1754, and 876. The modern use of tratado also extends, of course, to works composed later than BOOST's limit. 35. Weissberger is in no way disconcerted by this fact: ‘The Archpriest's work … can fruitfully be considered a mock-tractado’ (208). 36. See Olga Tudorica Impey, ‘Ovid, Alfonso X, and Juan Rodríguez del Padrón: Two Castilian translations of the Heroides and the beginnings of Spanish sentimental prose’, BHS, LVII (1980), 283–97, at p. 296 (n. 34). 37. This part of the definition tends to go by default, although it is clearly regularly assumed. It is explicit in Vocabolario degli Accademici delta Crusca, 5 vols (Naples 1746–48), s.v. trattato: ‘Discorso compilato e messo in iscrittura’. 38. To complete a proper structural semantic analysis of the term tratado, it would be necessary to examine at least French traité (traicté), English treatie (treaty), treatise, tract, and Italian trattato; doubtless (if I may quote one of my favourite footnotes), ‘il y a une belle thèse à écrire là-dessus’. But preliminary soundings seem to indicate that the use of these terms to refer to works of fiction first appears in translations from the Spanish (for instance, Petit traite de Arnalte et Lucenda, A Certayn Treatye Most Wyttely Deuised, A Small Treatise betwixt Arnalte and Lucenda, Picciol trattato d’Arnalte e di Lucenda, etc.), thus providing yet another example of L2 interference in L1. 39. I find almost nothing to quarrel with in Bruno M. Damiani, ‘The didactic intention of the Cárcel de Amor’, Hispanófila, 56 (1976), 29–43; but he does not rely on the interpretation oí autor or tratado as semantic latinisms.