La segunda edición del "Compendio tratto delle Osservationi della lingua castigliana"

Abstract

Three years after the publication of the Osservationi della lingua castigliana (Miranda 1566), Alfonso de Ulloa prepared an edition of a work in Venice (Troiano 1569), whose evident didactic purpose allows to call it a "conversation manual" (Sánchez Pérez 1992). This manual, titled Dialoghi di Massimo Troiano, consists of a) the re-edition of some dialogues written in Italian by the Neapolitan musician Massimo Troiano, which describe the festivities of the marriage between William V and Renata of Lorraine (Troiano 1568), presented in a bilingual edition alongside a Spanish translation attributed in the title to Giovanni Miranda; b) a summary in dialogue form of Giovanni Miranda's Osservationi (Compendio 1569); and c) a discourse with didactic advice on the most appropriate method for studying a foreign language, along with a catalog of useful translations for effectively continuing the language learning process.

The Compendio of 1569 had a second edition (Compendio 1601) in the early 17th century, this time Florentine, as an independent grammatical text, without the bilingual dialogues, but with a copious collection of metalinguistic annotations on Spanish and Italian, written alongside the text by the Sicilian Argisto Giuffredi.

This article analyzes the differences between the two editions of the Compendio, primarily consisting of the annotations in the second. The objectives pursued are as follows: to analyze the most salient features of the textual series, to explain the types of amendments Giuffredi made to the 1569 Compendio text, to propose a classification of the annotations, to show how the same work loses its clearly didactic purpose in the second edition and acquires another of a metagrammatical nature, in which the text — the Compendio itself — becomes subordinate to the epitext — the discussion of normative issues regarding Spanish and Italian — and, finally, to reflect on the placement of Argisto Giuffredi within the historiographical canon of Italian Hispanism.