Sherry Roush
Photo courtesy of Sherry Roush
Bio
Sherry Roush is a professor of Italian at Penn State University, specializing in Medieval and Renaissance literature. She is the author of Speaking Spirits: Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella (University of Toronto Press, 2002), the editor and translator of the facing-page edition of Tommaso Campanella’s Selected Philosophical Poems in two volumes (from the University of Chicago Press Poetry Series and Bruniana & Campanelliana Supplementi, Fabrizio Serra Editore, both 2011), and the co-editor of The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy (Arizona State University Press MRTS, 2005). A proud 2017 Middlebury Bread Loafer, she also serves as an elected representative on the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee for Translation Studies.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Italian of Peregrino by Jacopo Caviceo (1443-1511). Published in 1508 and considered a proto-novel with a Romeo and Juliet-style story, Peregrino was a European bestseller in its day—there were 21 Italian editions, as well as nine in French and three in Spanish. This Italian Renaissance romance is Caviceo's longest work. It tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers, Peregrino and Genevera. Enduring several tribulations during his love-pursuit—including being captured by pirates and a trip to Hell—Peregrino finally marries Genevera, only for the reader to discover that he is actually dead and his ghost has been telling the story all along. An English translation of Peregrino does not yet exist.
The moment I knew I had to translate Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino was when I read one sentence from Margaret Sayers Peden’s enchanting English rendition of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499). In it, an old woman appraises a young man with the unfiltered quip: “He’s a fuzzy-cheeked little cock-a-doodle-doo” (Act 7, Scene 3). Laughing through tears, I recalled similar phrasing in the Peregrino’s Italian, and I realized that it, too, had the potential to celebrate the semantic density and enormous expressive range of the English language. I am eager to showcase the Peregrino’s metaliterary wicked wit in 21st-century English.
Translation reminds me in some ways of my early experience as a violinist. Precise tuning in language, as in music, along with the quiet hours of disciplined practice, can permit the possibility of echoing a voice in the verbal art of literary translation, just as a musical performance can re-evoke a melodic trace. It’s a joyous challenge, and I am deeply grateful for the privilege of pursuing this challenge to transpose a literary legacy.
Undertaking this kind of project is downright quixotic, especially from within the American Academy today. I hope to be a voice for the valorization of translation scholarship as literary interpretation in its own right. Receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant also encourages me to consider uncovering other brilliant Italian proto-novels from among the many that remain entirely unknown to English readers today.