Hermes' Lyre, Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella.

Sherry L. Roush. Hermes' Lyre, Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella.

Buffalo and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. ix + 250 pp. index. bibl. $50. ISBN: 0-8020-3712-7.

Introduced by a captivating title, Sherry Roush's book, Hermes' Lyre, is an original and very interesting study of a literary genre that "has somehow not received the attention it deserves" (7), poetic self-commentary. As the story goes, Hermes, in exchange for his lyre, received from Apollo the art of divination, becoming in this way a poet-prophet and lending his name to the art of interpretation, of commentary--hermeneutics. As the author declares in the preface, it was her fascination with the "proximity of poetry and hermeneutics" (viii) that triggered her inquiry.

Poetic self-commentary, whose first example in Italian literature is Dante's prosimetron of the Vita Nuova, is a mixed genre consisting of poetry and a prose comment made by the author. But what makes a self-commentary a self-commentary? For example, why are Boccaccio's glosses to the Teseida a self-commentary and not Petrarch's glosses to the Canzoniere? And what is the role of the self-commentator as opposed to the outside commentator? To the first question, Roush answers by saying that "Petrarch did not view these notes as an integral part of the lyric work" (65). As for the second, it is precisely the presence of the word self--a key word--that makes the commentary a poetic commentary. The autobiographical perspective causes the interpretation to be a work in need of interpretation itself because it does not reveal the secret and therefore needs further interpretation. As Dante, not sure of the place to assign to his work in the commentary tradition, puts it in referring to his prose writing in the Convivio, poetic self-commentary is a "quasi comento" (1.3.2).

Roush considers six poetic self-commentators and two forms of comments, the prosimetrical and the glossorial. She divides her book accordingly in six chapters (a seventh is a very brief overview of the genre after the Renaissance), each dedicated to a different author, further divided in three parts, depending on the historical period. Therefore, part 1 is dedicated to Dante (Vita Nuova and Convivio) and Boccaccio (Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia); part 2 to Lorenzo dei Medici (Comento de' miei sonetti) and Girolamo Benivieni (whose Commento to his songs and sonnets is still unedited); and part 3 to Giordano Bruno (Eroici furori) and Tommaso Campanella (Scelta di alcune poesie filosofiche di Settimontano Squilla). Inside this division a further subdivision can be made: Dante's, Lorenzo's, and Bruno's works are prosimetra; on the contrary, Boccaccio's, Benivieni's, and Campanella's commentaries are self-glosses.

Roush's assumption is that the inspiration of medieval and Renaissance Christian Italian poetry participates "in the transcendent Spirit infusing the ultimate Author and His Word" (13). From this assumption comes her Trinitarian idea of the poetic self-commentary, composed in her view of poetry, self-commenting prose, and what she calls the quid, i.e. the "otherness of their inspiration" (14). This interpretative lens takes us into a diachronic-synchronic journey that leads from the Gospel parables, on which Dante modeled the veiled language of the Convivio, through the Socratic dialogue used by Tommaso Bruno, to the eschatological prophecy of Campanella's Poesie filosofiche. According to the author, after the Renaissance the genre becomes virtually extinct because this transcendent perspective will gradually lose its grip.

Although Roush does here and there associate autobiography with self-commentary, the "faith-motivated hermeneutics" (13) she chooses to adopt prevents her from fully acknowledging, and therefore thoroughly exploiting, the links between these two very close related literary genres (so close related that the English edition's title of Lorenzo's Comento is The Autobiography of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent). It is Dante again who makes this link clear when in the Convivio he questions himself on the legitimacy of "parlare di se medesimo." The "quasi comento" is after all a comment on his own life. Indeed, autobiography, like self-commentary, is "a retrospective on the original text. It involves a turning back of one's gaze to bring into focus the writing of the past ... it is a proleptic vision" (150).

On a small note, I would like to suggest--if the book gets reprinted--modifying the order of the bibliography. A simple alphabetical order would allow the reader to find the references easily instead of having to find out to which of the five categories a book belongs.

ROBERTA ANTOGNINI

Vassar College