Boscán's Rewriting of the Rime Sparse

The translatio studii , as we saw in the last chapter, was a persistent topic in the Spanish Renaissance. Although earlier commentators such as Encina and Valdés cited the accomplishments of Boccaccio and Petrarch as models for the Spanish, they did so in terms of the Italians' efforts at improving their language. Juan Boscán was the first to assert that Petrarch should be a textual model, explaining, in the dedication that precedes book 2, his preference for the Italian forms because of their better antecedents (having been employed by Petrarch, Dante, and the Provençal poets), and because the longer hendecasyllabic line is aesthetically superior to the short, sound-oriented lines of medieval Castilian poetry. By ignoring fifteenth-century imitators of Petrarch, Bosán posed as the first Spanish Petrarchist poet, translating, as if in a vacuum, the Italian forms to Spain.^[1] Although the preface is imbued with the spirit of courtly sprezzatura , Boscán's sonnets are not mere exercises, but an ambitious set of Petrarchan imitations both individually and in their macrotextual arrangement.

The arrangement of the poems in Boscán's second book is canonical: although he died shortly before their publication, his wife, Doña Ana Girón de Rebolledo, declares in her unsigned preface that as the task was nearly completed, "á parescido passar adelante lo que él dexava enpeçado, digo la impresión" (it has seemed best to proceed with what he had begun, by which I mean the printing, 3). Yet this organizational aspect to the poems in book 2 was insufficiently appreciated by the early editors and critics of Boscán's works. In the first modern edition of Boscán's poetry (1875), William I. Knapp separated the canciones that the poet had intercalated among the sonnets, gathering them at the end. This rearrangement had a significant effect on subsequent readers of the poetry, who tended to emphasize, on a microtextual level, Boscán's borrowings from Petrarch, Ausías March, and other sources.^[2] Thus although sixteenth-century editions of Boscán are by no means rare, and in 1936 there appeared a facsimile of the 1543 princeps , only the publication of the critical edition by Martín de Riquer in 1957 rectified the situations.^[3] Recognition that the poems in book 2 constitute a macrotext is important because Boscán has suffered from the reputation of being a

mediocre poet at best; he has been criticized for using forced rhymes (Parducci, 48–51), for having very little imagery (Morreale, 251–53, 261–63), and for following Petrarch both too closely (Menéndez y Pelayo, 282) and not closely enough (286–87). These judgments are all based on notions of originality and poetic language as applied to individual poems; examination of the collection as such places Boscán in a better light, for as a collection the group of poems functions very well indeed. It is also historically notable that he chose to present his poems to us in this way, for macrotextual collections never became the rule in sixteenth-century Spain.^[4]

Book 2 consists of ninety-two sonnets and ten canciones . Like Petrarch, Boscán uses the canciones to focus the collection, recapitulating the preceding sonnets and sending the subsequent poems off in a different direction. Yet the total lack of autobiographical detail is a surprise, for where Petrarch localized Laura in time and space and used her name as one of the symbolic underpinnings of the collection (laura as the laurel tree and thus a symbol for poetry, as well as a reminder of the myth of Daphne and Apollo; l'aura as the dawn; etc.), Boscán refuses to name his beloved or give any information about her. Thus there is no sonnet parallel to Petrarch's "Era il giorno ch' al sol si scoloraro" (where Petrarch falls in love) or "Quando io muovo i sospiri a chiamar voi" (where Petrarch tells us Laura's name). Because otherwise Boscán follows the Italian poet's example very closely, this reticence shows him not only imitating Petrarch, but trying to rival him as well by doing something different. By not tying himself down to the specific circumstances of a particular love affair, Boscán attempts to write a sonnet collection that is both more universal and more abstract.^[5] The departure is immediately felt by the reader, whose expectations of Petrarchan detail are continuously frustrated.

The knowledgeable reader recognizes that Boscán is imitating Petrarch, for the very pretense of addressing an innocent reader is only the first of Boscán's Petrarchan imitations. The first four poems in the collection develop the theme established by Petrarch in his first poem: the poet addresses a reader and warns about the travails of love, and the very first line of Petrarch's first sonnet, "Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono" (you who hear in scattered rhymes the sound) is echoed in line 9 of Boscán's "¡O! vosotros que andáys tras mis escritos" (Oh! you who wander after my writings, XXIX;

but note the transformation from an oral context, ascoltate , to a written one, escritos , important in terms of the critique of sound-oriented poetry in Boscán's preface).^[6] Like Petrarch, Boscán appears concerned that readers draw a moral lesson from his sorrows, a point he repeatedly makes in the first few poems. In the initial sonnets, he employs an almost semiotic vocabulary to mark the shift from hearing to reading and to underscore his concern that, by presenting signs of his wounds and pains (that is, by writing them up in these poems), the poet will be able to teach his readers a moral lesson. Thus in the opening lines of sonnet 2 he expresses the desire that his invisible (because they are interior and emotional) wounds become visible signs capable of instructing others, and he refers to them as an "istoria," a history or narrative available to those who know how to decipher it. Yet he hesitates, for the wounds are "señales tan feas, que é vergüença de mostrallas" (such ugly signs, that I am ashamed to show them, 2, XXX.13–14). The verb mostrar leads directly into the next poem, in which he resolves to show them because the potential benefits to others outweigh his shame, and in which he envisions the wounds as a broadsheet, "de mi muerte'l gran letrero" (of my death a great announcement, 3, XXXI.11). This textualizing of his suffering takes a further step in the next sonnet, in which knowledge of his suffering precedes him, "dando nuevas de mi desasossiego" (giving news of my distress, 4, XXXII.6); those who follow him will have no excuse for their ignorance. The semiotic theme continues in the ninth poem: there the poet compares himself to an astronomical sign in need of interpretation, and in sonnet 10, a meditation on his failure to assess correctly the beloved's attitude, in which he uses the word "vi" (I saw) to mark his enlightenment. It culminates in the last line of the eighteenth sonnet (XLVI), where he certifies himself as an interpreter, "ya no soy sabidor, sino adevino" (I am no longer knowledgeable but clairvoyant), and thus takes on the ancient mantle of the vates .

In sonnet 5 Boscán hyperbolically develops Petrarch's sonnet 2 ("Per fare una leggiadra sua vendetta / . . . / celatamente Amor l'arco riprese" [To take a graceful revenge . . . Love took up his bow again secretly], Rime sparse 2.1, 3); he too is enslaved by love, only it happened to him when he was still an infant, "aún bien no fuy^[*] salido de la cuna, / . . . / quando el amor me tuvo condenado" (I

had not yet emerged from my crib . . . when love seized and condemned me). The poem concludes with a set of questions:

¡O coraçón!, que siempre has padecido
dime: tan fuerte mal, ¿cómo es tan largo?
Y mal tan largo—di—, ¿cómo es tan fuerte?
(XXXIII.1, 3, 12–14)

Oh heart, you who have always suffered tell me: such a strong pain, how can it last so long? And such a long pain—say—how can it be so strong?

These questions also become a motif of the early sonnets, as the poet struggles to understand what has happened to him. Thus in sonnet 6 (whose astrological imagery parallels that in Petrarch's third sonnet), he is caught in an everlasting night; while in sonnet 7 ("Solo y pensoso en páramos desiertos," an echo of "Solo et pensoso i piú deserti campi") his senses have fled from him. In sonnet 8 he recalls desiring to express his love to his beloved; this frustrated desire is balanced by the comet in sonnet 9 that makes men prophets, which is compared to the effect that his suffering will have on others who can interpret it. In the twelfth poem the Petrarchan landscape—wild and unknown, an echo of poem 7—in which the poet finds himself stands metaphorically for his emotional condition, which resists understanding. The image of the poet as a wanderer reappears in the next two poems as well, where he trembles at seeing where his footsteps have brought him and longs to stop moving. Increasingly, he is alienated from himself: "Traygo este cuerpo" (I carry this body, 14, XLII.5) becomes, a couple of poems later, the Quevedesque "llevo tras mí mis años arrastrando" (I drag my years behind me, 17, XLV.2).

The twin themes of his failure to understand his condition, together with his suffering as a sign to others, continue to preoccupy him through the subsequent sonnets. They culminate in sonnet 18, the last before the first canción:

Oíd, oíd, los hombres y las gentes,
un caso nuevo que'n amar s'offrece:
amor en mí con su deleyte creçe,
mientras más males tengo, y más presentes
(XLVI.1–4)

Hear hear, men and peoples, a new instance of love offers itself: love with his delights in me grows, the more sufferings I have, and the more present

and in the canción itself, "Quiero hablar un poco, / mas teme'l coraçón de fatigarse" (I wish to speak some but my heart fears exhaustion, XLVII.1–2). When one considers that this is the first Petrarchist poem collection written in Spain, Boscán's torments, his incomprehension, and at the same time his desire to be a sign for others take on a new aspect. Like the preface, these first few poems serve as a platform for a critique of earlier Spanish poetry. Boscán was unable to understand what had happened to him because he had no models, no literary forerunners who could enlighten him about the nature of Petrarchan love, which he presents as in some crucial way different from the kind of love present in earlier poetry. Had other Spanish poets written about Petrarchan love before him, he would have been able to understand it. He thus draws a connection between the new meters and genres, and a new thematics of love.^[7] Similarly, he asserts for himself a role in literary history, instructing others who read him in the new ways of love and poetry; those who read his poems but fail to learn their lesson will no longer have an excuse. In sonnet 18 he receives some encouragement and it enables him to address the reader directly. Instead of having the reader draw conclusions from his sufferings and interpreting them as signs and comets are interpreted, Boscán can now tell us directly about his love; in semiotic terms, this change presents a shift from visual showing to oral saying. It is consequently no coincidence that both sonnet 18 and the first canción start with addresses to the reader: "listen" and "I want to speak."

Thus, there is a double didacticism at work in these early poems. On the amatory, thematic level, they are meant to admonish people not to make Boscán's mistake, not to fall in love as he has done; this aim will ultimately be inverted at the end of the collection. But on a metapoetic level, Boscán provides instruction both in Petrarchan love and in writing Petrarchan sonnets, so that in spite of the stated aim of warning people away, he actually seeks to be imitated. Boscán builds his collection consciously around the model provided by Petrarch, and it should be read in the same way, so that the decisions he makes exist in tension with Petrarch's collection and with the

reader's own ability to understand the love that afflicts the poet even as he himself does not. He obliges readers to "fictionalize" themselves (see Ong, 62–69) twice over, as erotic naïfs in need of instruction, but also as literary connoisseurs who recognize his models.^[8] The awareness of Petrarch's text creates a split, with the historical Juan Boscán and the reader, both familiar with Petrarch, on one side, and the implied reader as well as the poet-lover on the other. The latter figure is in turn fragmented even more: there is the lover's past history, which he did not understand, and which is narrated by the poet recollecting it in something less than tranquility and with greater or lesser degrees of understanding.^[9]

This division becomes particularly apparent in the first canción (poem 19, XLVII). As Parducci suggests (67–69), its basis is in Petrarch's famous canzone of metamorphosis, "Nel dolce tempo," save that for Boscán stasis triumphs over transformation. Yet stasis must give way to mutation so that a narrative can get started, or else the entire work might come to a halt. The need to narrate in order to organize a poem collection is the underlying theme of the 453-line poem, in which, as noted before, the poet finally gets to speak; and in contrast to his earlier tongue-tied and paralyzed state, he is at first unable to restrain himself:

hablaré, por no starme como stoy,
    pues no puedo star quedo,
. . .
Si parto, sólo por irme, me voy;
mudanças hago por no ser quien soy.
(18–19, 21–22)

I will speak, so as not to be as I am, for I cannot remain quiet. . . . If I depart, only to leave, I go; I transform myself so as not to be who I am.

The disjunction between lover and poet in this poem becomes particularly clear when one examines the use of grammatical tenses. The frame of the poem, "quiero hablar," is in the present, but the subject of this discourse is the history of his love.^[10] Speaking of it should serve as an instructional sign for others, as in the sonnets, and it may also have a therapeutic effect, "escójolo por menos peligroso" (I choose it because it is less dangerous, 9). Yet it might also bring him shame and, by forcing him to relive the experience, cast

him back into its turbulence, a possibility both frightening and irresistible:

Oyo llamar de lexos mis gemidos,
y é lástima de ver que van perdidos.
   ¡O mis crudos dolores,
dadme un poco d'alivio porque pueda
provar a ver si diré lo que digo!
(59–63)

I hear my cries call from afar, and I grieve to see they are lost. Oh my cruel pains, give me some relief so that I might attempt to see if I will say what I say!

The future tense here and at other key points throughout the poem suggests that once the discourse is started, the poet himself does not know where it will take him. Still it is not easy for him to get started, and so much of his speech becomes a metadiscourse on the difficulties of narration. His memory fails him, and "olvidando el comienço, el fin no hallo" (forgetting the beginning, I cannot find the end, 53). Whatever he says he must unsay, and everything comes out disorganized. Recalling the sonnets, he once again stresses the unprecedented nature of his love experience, but his attempt to narrate flounders in a series of imperfects that describe a recurring condition: hazía, spantava, osava, tentava, scapava, dexava, crecía, ocorríame , and so on—two and a half fourteen-line stanzas of almost exclusively imperfect verbs. When he does break into preterits, it is only to admit the hopelessness of his situation: "Quando pude curarme, no lo vi; / agora que no puedo, lo entendí" (When I could cure myself, I did not see it; now that I cannot, I understand, 149–50). Although these struggles with narration continue, he eventually succeeds in describing what happened to him, in a series of terse and halting independent clauses:

    El mal se declaró,
señaló y encontró todo en un punto;
mató después por términos, y largos;
   salióme el dolor junto;
dizen que'l alma del golpe cayó.
(211–15)

Suffering declared itself, signaled and found everything ready; later it killed in long measures; pain appeared along with it; they say my soul fell from the blow.

From this point on he can describe his love in terms of the familiar (to the reader) Petrarchan paradigm: he loved in secret and enjoyed the beloved's favors, but when he confessed ("Assí osando y temiendo, / díxeos no sé qué; no sé si os lo dixe" [thus daring and fearing, I don't know what I said to you; I don't know if I said it to you], 86–87), she spurned him.^[11] Eventually, however, he becomes trapped in stasis once again: the wheel of fortune turns but his situation remains always the same, and this new cycle of recurring situations, in the present tense, recalls the earlier one in the imperfect. Love keeps bringing back the same fantasy of hope even as he realizes that he can never attain it; once again he is unable to understand his situation ("Mas ¿dónde stoy? ¿Qué hago? / ¿Do tan allá el tormento me desvía?" [But where am I? What am I doing? To what beyond is torment diverting me?], 439–40), and finally his discourse breaks down completely ("No quiero más con quexas encenderme" [I no longer wish to burn with complaints], 443).

Still, this first canción has not been a total failure, for it has moved the lover away from his initial state of ignorance, and with him the putatively innocent reader, bringing them both closer to the actual poet and reader. It is followed by Boscán's most famous poem, the canción "Claros y frescos ríos" (XLVIII), an imitation of Petrarch's "Chiare fresche et dolci acque" (Rime sparse 126), which was itself also preceded by a poem devoted to the difficulty of speaking, "Se 'l pensier che mi strugge" (Rime sparse 125; see Durling, The Figure , 68–72). Yet the landscape that for Petrarch was so suggestive of Laura's body here becomes harsh and psychologically symbolic: as Cruz points out, the departures from the model stress the poet's isolation from his beloved and at the same time reduce the element of erotic idolatry present in the original, with the result that Boscán effects a disjunctive imitation of his model, recognizing its origin in order to hide it in his own poem (55).^[12] In contrast to the preceding canción , the smoothly flowing hepta- and hendecasyllables exemplify the virtues Boscán asserted in the preface, without the paralyzing, fractured syntax that reflected the first canción 's concern with

the difficulties of narration. In the third stanza, Boscán finally presents what is to be the somewhat obsessive theme of the poem, the continuing appeal of fantasy over harsh reality:

    He de querer la vida,
    fingiéndome sperança,
y engañar mal que tanto desengaña.
(25–29)

I ought to love life, feigning hope, and deceive that suffering that so undeceives.

As this conflict is one he shares with both Petrarch and the native tradition, Boscán here is not so much declaring his independence as asserting his continuity with his predecessors. Like his Italian model, in successive stanzas he imagines himself speaking with the beloved, pictures her laughter, and returns in his mind compulsively to the place where they first met:

    Viéneme a la memoria
    dónde la vi primero,
y aquel lugar do començé d'amalla.
(79–81)

There comes to my memory the place I first saw her and where I began to love her.

Parducci (57) sees in the appeal to memory an echo of Petrarch's "dolce ne la memoria" (sweetly in memory, Rime sparse 126.41); more generically, one can note throughout Petrarch a similar return to the time and place of his meeting with Laura (e.g., "Benedetto sia . . . e 'l loco ov' io fui giunto" [Blessed be . . . the place where I was struck], Rime sparse 61.1–4; "la memoria . . . mi mostra e 'l loco e 'l tempo" [memory . . . points out to me the place and the time], ibid., 175.13–14). Recalling the opening sonnets, Boscán repeatedly stresses the visual nature of his fantasy, but as Cruz observed (Imitación , 58) he shies away from actual physical description in favor of a catalog of her virtues. The cycles of encouragement and discouragement recall the preceding canción (and are a theme in Garcilaso as well), yet working against the alternation, as Cruz points out, Boscán's poem emphasizes the lovers' sure reconciliation, indicated

by the future tense in the lines just before the envoi, "que yo la veré presto, / y miraré aquel cuerpo y aquel gesto" (for I will see her soon, and gaze on that body and on that face, 168–69). As these lines are spoken by the poet to his heart in an attempt to encourage it, they do not have an objectively prophetic value, yet they do suggest an outcome different from Petrarch's, and implicate this poem in a linear narrative that will be achieved in the final poems of the collection. The theme of vision is playfully turned in on itself in the closing lines:

Cancón; bien sé dónde bolver querrías,
   y la que ver desseas,
pero no quiero que sin mí la veas.
(170–72)

Song, I know where you wished to return, and her whom you desire to see, but I don't want you to see her without me.

The envoi echoes Petrarch's "Ben sai, canzon" (Rime sparse 127.99), but, in contrast to Petrarch's fantasy about his song orally (and thus together with him) presenting a message to Laura, Boscán emphasizes that a written poem can make a journey, and "see" the beloved as she reads it (a point Petrarch exploits in other poems).

Boscán's second canción opens the main body of the collection. It consists of a mixture of sonnets and canciones in a combination of Petrarchan and traditional Castilian styles, in which the poet continues his struggle to narrate and to attain permanent rather than cyclical change. Particularly interesting, as Armisén has pointed out (391–95), is the sequence surrounding the forty-ninth poem (LXXVII), a sonnet at the very center of the collection. Its centrality is itself thematized within the poem, as Boscán recalls his position in the middle of fortune's wheel and recapitulates the cycles of hope and despair that have preoccupied him since the first canción , particularly in the two preceding sonnets; the metatextual concern with centering at the very center of the collection shows Boscán's strict sense of architectural organization. The central sonnet in turn is framed on the other side by a series recapitulating the beloved's birth in astrological terms, his falling in love, and their separation—the very subject matter of those early, halting poems, but now with greater self-understanding. The opening lines of the fiftieth poem, "Mueve'l querer las alas con gran fuerça / tras el loor d'aquella que

yo canto" (Desire moves its wings with great strength in praise of her whom I sing, LXXVIII.1–2), are ambiguous as to which—desire or the poet's song—is responsible for the other. The same suggestion that art precedes reality recurs in the following poem, where heaven and earth, pictured as artists, pool their skill to create his beloved; these masters, pleased with their creation, see that "acudía / la mano al punto de la fantasía" (their hands were capable of the fantasy, 51, LXXIX.6–7). The emphasis on visual image recalls the second canción , as does the restatement of Petrarch's "Benedetto sia" (Rime sparse 61):

Dichos el día, dichosa la hora,
tambiné la tierra donde nacer quiso
ésta del mundo general señora.
Dichosa edad, que tanto se mejora,
pues entre sí ya tienen paraýso
los que infierno tuvieron hasta'gora.
(51, LXXIX.9–14)

Happy the day, happy the hour, also the land where she chose to be born, this lady commander of the world. Happy the age that so improves, for they have among themselves a paradise whou until now had only a hell.

But while in sonnet 61 Petrarch praises not where Laura was born but where he met her and how the experience transformed him into a poet, Boscán in these closing lines veers from mythological encomium to sacred hyperbole (associating her birth with Jesus's), a direction carried farther in the next sonnet, where the poet asks himself how her birth could have gone unnoticed, and asserts that she is not given but merely lent by God in order to show his capabilities. Whereas two poems earlier Boscán had sublimated himself in her, "vean a mí, y entenderán a ella" (look at me, and you will understand her, 49, LXXVII.10), now he affirms that "en ella él se viesse" (he could be seen in her, 52, LXXX.13).^[13] This assertion of the saving power of the beloved again underlines the linearity of the collection by pointing to its conclusion. Just as the opening set of sonnets in the collection constituted a defined set, so too do the closing group of poems. The transition to this final group is an abrupt one; in sonnet 85 (CXIII), Boscán declares that the thought of perishing was so welcome to him that it gave him the very strength that led to his

inadvertent survival. This concept, emblematic of the vicious circle in which he has been caught since the first canción , is common in Petrarch and the cancionero , and by using it at this point in the collection Boscán reasserts his connection to the preceding traditions, highlighting the degree to which he will depart from it in the concluding poems.

In sonnet 18 Boscán referred to himself as "un caso nuevo" (a new case). This line is echoed in the eighty-sixth poem (CXIV), which occupies an almost symmetrical position in relation to the end of the collection, and in which Boscán describes a sudden change of state:

Otro tiempo lloré y agora canto,
canto d'amor mis bienes sossegados;
d'amor lloré mis males tan penados, que por necessidad era mi llanto.
Agora empieça Amor un nuevo canto.
(1–5)

Once I wept and now I sing, I sing of the wealth my love secured; I wept my painful love sufferings, that made weeping necessary. Now Love begins a new song.

The phrase nuevo canto echoes Petrarch's "Io canterei d'Amor sí novamente" (I would sing of love in so rare a way, Rime sparse 131.1), but also Psalm 149:1, "Entonad al Señor un canto nuevo, su voz suene en el concejo de los altos" (Sing to the Lord a new song, let his voice ring in the councils of the high); throughout this last section of the poem collection, both Petrarchan and biblical allusions tie the poems together as Boscán celebrates his conversion from a passionate love which brought him only unhappiness, a conversion that recalls the one experienced by Petrarch after Laura's death (although of course Boscán gives us no such biographical fact to explain or motivate it).^[14] Yet, in addition to these references, two other features unite the closing poems: specific recollections of earlier poems in the collection, particularly the opening sequence of sonnets and the first canción , and a growing assertion of the poet's role as a rival to Petrarch.

Indeed the very biblical allusions that Boscán uses serve in part to assert this rivalry, for just as Petrarch used as an organizing principle allusions to the Passion, Boscán selects passages typologically

associated with the Resurrection. Thus in sonnet 88 (CXVI) he speaks of being resurrected by love; in 90 (CXVIII) he recalls the plagues in Exodus, from which he is spared; and in 91 (CXIX) he is in Paradise. In 92 (CXX) God is responsible for the change in him, while in 96 (CXXIV) he compares himself to both the blind man whose sight was restored and the Jews marveling at his recovery. In 99 chaste love, sent by God, speaks to him the words spoken by Jesus to the cripple, "¡toma tu lecho a cuestas y haz tu vía!" (take up your bedding and go on your way! CXXVII.8; cf. John 5:8, etc.).

In addition to these biblical and religious allusions, the closing sonnets also contain a great many references to the opening poems. The new love introduced in sonnet 86 allows him to sing, that is, to compose poetry, the very activity that the old love made so difficult in the first canción . That poem is also specifically recalled in the next sonnet:

Demás del gran milagro que Amor hizo,
haziéndome, después de star deshecho,
fué muy maravilloso y nuevo hecho
ver que un Amor me hizo y me deshizo.
(87, CXV.1–4)

In addition to the great miracle Love performed, making me after I had been unmade, it was a new and marvelous deed to see how Love could make and unmake me.

The earlier cycle of hacer and deshacer is now cast in the preterit, as something finished, while a new cycle that remakes him has replaced it. In light of this transformation, he learns that he can both love and be loved, and "que'n Amor no es término forçado / sólo scrivir aquél cue dolor siente" (in love it is not obligatory that only he who is in pain can write, 89, CXVII.3–4). Poetry can thus free itself from the ancient paradigms of suffering. Two poems later, love can provide him a "dulce . . . un no se qué" (a sweet . . . I know not what, 91, CXIX.9), a phrase that recalls his barely comprehensible confession in the canción . Above all, no longer is his poetry, like Petrarch's, a warning against love: now it is an encouragement to love, to take heart from his example. Whereas earlier he had been a sign warning of sterility, in 94 the fire with which he burns is "puro y simple" (pure and simple, CXXII.2); and in contrast to the desolate landscape portrayed in the second canción , he brings spring wher-

ever he goes. Thus the breach between his functions as model lover and model poet is healed.

The closing sonnets also contain a number of navigation images, in which the poet speaks of being safely in a harbor and of being saved from a shipwreck. In part they refer to a series of sonnets in the middle of the collection (71, XCIX; 72, C; 79, CVII; 84, CXII) in which the opposite was the case. The topos is Horatian in origin, and while it has some biblical resonances as well, they are relatively weak. Why then does Boscán repeatedly employ it in this final section of his collection? To find the answer one must turn back to Petrarch and examine the nature of his conversion in the final poems of the Rime sparse (see Kennedy, 40). After Laura's death, Petrarch does indeed change his attitude about love, but his initial reaction is to despair: her death has left him totally disconsolate, and he compares himself several times to a ship out of control in a storm. As Parducci noted (65–66), Boscán picks up the image from Petrarch, but he turns it around: whereas Petrarch is lost on stormy seas, Boscán is safe and sound. Indeed, several times in these final poems Boscán sets himself up as a direct rival to Petrarch; sonnet 89, for example, contains the only overt allusion to the laurel in the entire collection:

Celebrado seré en toda la gente,
llevando en mi triunpho para'l cielo,
con el verde laurel la blanca palma.
(CXVI.11–14)

I will be celebrated by all peoples, taking my triumph to heaven, the white palm together with the green laurel.

Boscáns conception of love, at the end of the collection, is likewise very different from the Petrarchan love that at first he could not understand. As already noted, at the end of the collection Love is specifically associated with the poet's salvation; he is the one who speaks God's words, and it is only because Boscán has experienced "un nuevo Amor" (a new Love, 90, CXVIII.1) that he can sing his "nuevo canto. He sums up this lesson in sonnet 93:

Amor es bueno en sí naturalmente,
y si por causa d'él males tenemos,

será porque seguimos los estremos,
y assí es culpa de quien sus penas siente.
(CXXI.1–4)

Love is good in itself by its nature, and if because of him we have sufferings, it is only because we exceed his limits and so the fault belongs to him who suffers.

For Petrarch, Love always remained a trickster who had enslaved him, and while once Laura was dead he came to value chastity, it was only because it increased the chances of their being reunited in Paradise. Boscán by contrast transforms the notion of love in this world, and with this new conception of love, he is already in Paradise. Petrarch looks forward to death, while Boscán is already resurrected.^[15]

These themes are all brought together in the final poem of the collection—a canción —which, in contrast to the first one, opens with a relatively simple and direct autobiographical narration of his early errors. He concedes that love had brought him both pleasure and pain, but both were equally the misguided results of his delusions. Only the direct intervention of God, "que derramó su sangre por nosotros" (who spilled his blood for us, 102, CXXX.62), has broken this cycle, and the implied biblical comparisons of the closing sonnets are finally resolved by the poet when he overtly compares himself to Lazarus,

    Tú, Dios, con tu sentencia
m'enterraste'n dolores tan continos,
porque después me diesse tu clemencia
que otro Lázaro fuesse'n tu presencia
(73–75)

You, God, with your sentence buried me in continual pain, so that later you could give me your clemency that I might be another Lazarus in your presence

as well as to the victim rescued by the good Samaritan (see Darst, Juan Boscán , 77–80 and Cruz, Imitación , 61).

The overall result is to give the implicit narrative a stronger ending than that of Petrarch's Rime sparse . Instead of the weak lover gradually finding solace in the notion of a world to come, we have a strong one who has already managed to find his salvation. When

discussing the end of the collection, traditional Boscán scholarship has focused on interpreting just what this new love of Boscán's is meant to represent. Cruz (ibid., 62) is closer to the mark when she asserts that the autobiographical implications of the last poems derive from Boscán's imitation of Bembo and Petrarch, and that a literary appreciation of their function need not be based on any particular interpretation of these poems. Thus the final poems are important not only for our understanding of Boscán's notions of love, but even more for our appreciation of what he, as a latter-day rival of Petrarch, was trying to do. He began the collection by obviously imitating Petrarch, leading the reader to expect the same kind of thing. He concludes it by challenging Petrarch and setting up an alternate vision of love, and an immanent rather than a transcendental closing to the collection. Whereas the first poems in the collection offer us a paraphrase of Petrarch, frustrating to the reader familiar with the Rime sparse in their lack of personal detail, the last poems present a rewriting of the sonnet collection in which the poet frees himself from the limits imposed by Petrarch's conception of love.^[16] Only by reading the collection as a whole and in comparison with Petrarch's can Boscán's achievement be appreciated on its own terms; reading them together illuminates Boscán's choices and casts a critical light on the original.

As noted at the beginning of this section, the collection contains a double narrative, that of the lover learning about love, presented in a series of present-tense "snapshots but also the somewhat later recollections of the poet. The key event both in the fiction of his life and in his struggle to narrate is the conversion that occurs at the eighty-sixth poem, which is presented by means of Christian imagery. Yet this is not Boscán's only conversion; it depends, in fact, on that earlier conversion, before the poem collection even began, to Petrarchism and away from the composition of traditional Spanish poetry. It is the subject of the preface to the collection, and in that preface it too is described via biblical allusions. Thus in addition to the fictional love-narrative and the narrative of the poet writing about his love, we have a third narrative, perhaps also fictional, of Boscán's learning to write like Petrarch and then gradually outdoing him.

Yet a fourth narrative can be construed, that of our reading of the collection. For Corti, one of the keys to macrotextuality is the

arrangement of the texts. Most of these features, particularly the carrying over of images and allusions, can only be ascertained through a process of reading through a collection that is at least somewhat extensive. Reading implies time, and time in turn begets narration; that makes reading any macrotext somewhat akin to reading fiction. Narrativity, in imitation of Petrarch, is a key feature of Boscán's work, both formally (because he is imitating Petrarch and Bembo in writing an imitatio vitae ) and thematically (the many poems that reflect on the difficulty of narration). In this fourth narrative the break between the doubly fictionalized readers is healed, and it is we as readers who are converted, minimally into admirers of Boscán's maximally into his imitators.^[17] Corti, by singling out the macrotext as a special kind of sign and providing terms for its evaluation that take into account the special modes of signification that it employs, gives us another way to approach Boscdán's literary accomplishment. Applying the criteria of macrotextuality to book 2 gives us a very different view of Boscán's poetic abilities, albeit one that resists the kind of anthologizing that earns a place in the canon. Boscán's techniques—a careful web of literary allusion, themes carried over from sonnet to sonnet, and images recalled across the space of many poems—are borrowed from Petrarch, but they must be examined with a literary theory that has a place for them. When this is done, Boscán's collection as a whole is seen not as a weak copy of Petrarch, but instead as a strong work that stands not only on its own, but in tension with the original.