The emotional aesthetics of transformation. A Baroque reexamination of Apollo and Daphne’s fable

Abstract

The well-known Sonnet XIII by Garcilaso de la Vega «A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían» was to establish the disconsolate figure of Apollo, pining for the loss of Daphne, as the literary paradigm of the pangs of love —at least in Renaissance literature in the Iberian peninsula. Thus, a century later, Francesc Fontanella revisited the Garcilaso sonnet and carried out a profoundly Baroque re-reading. The Catalan text ‘transforms’ the symmetry and order in which the Spanish sonnet describes the metamorphosis of the nymph into an inseparable amalgam between the old way of being and the new reality, between the human and the plant, and freezes the figure in mutation: neither the original form nor the results of the process are as interesting as the mutation itself, an idea that conforms to Baroque sensitivities of the aesthetics of transformation. At the same time, the essentially sensory terms of the Renaissance text are transmuted, in the Catalan sonnet, into emotional, human characteristics; the Baroque poet emphasizes Daphne’s intentionality regarding her (almost self-)transformation, and attributes to her an extraordinary willfulness, contrary to Apollo, which is, in the end, to no avail. Finally, Fontanella’s elegiac text breaks with the secular expectations typical of Renaissance sonnets as an emblem of love’s misfortune and instead, rises above them based on the literaturization of the biographical experience.