L’estètica emocional de la transformació: una revisitació barroca de la Faula d’Apol·lo i Dafne
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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