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“Sound Still Lives in Her”

Echo as a Force of Poetic Transformation in the Voices of Ovid and Gaspara Stampa

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by Alexia Dochnal ’27

To write is to echo. Beyond its literal dimension as a sonic effect that rings and reverberates, echo carries artistic power. By leveraging echo as a literary medium, writers draw from and remodel existing narratives and voices to create poetic landscapes of their own. A close reading of the works of Ovid and Gaspara Stampa, coupled with Adriana Cavarero’s theory of vocality, reveals that for each of these writers, the emergence of a distinct poetic voice becomes possible through echo. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echo is a character. In Stampa’s sonnets, echo arises through poetic allusions to Petrarch and Sappho. In vacillating among different forms of echo—as character and as allusion—Ovid and Stampa suggest that to write is to cling to and reshape others’ voices, unveiling new modes of expression that transcend the binaries of past and present and of logos and phone, or rational speech and pure voice. 

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In For More Than One Voice, Cavarero introduces Aristotle’s definition of man as zoon logon echon, which she translates as “the living creature who has logos” (Cavarero 34). According to Cavarero, the dual significance of the Greek term logos as both word and reason indicates that in Aristotle’s conception of human nature, it is not only rationality, but speech that elevates man over other living beings (34). Cavarero cites Aristotle’s definition of logos in the Poetics as phone semantike or “signifying voice” (34). Under this definition, logos is the voice that names, communicates, and signifies, while phone, or “the voice [that] is a pure vocality that says nothing” (107), belongs to the “inferior” realm of “animal” existence (34). Cavarero characterizes the Aristotelian separation of logos and phone as a reflection of the hierarchy between voice and speech that dominates the Western philosophical tradition (35). To Cavarero, this hierarchy is a product of patriarchal domination, for “the symbolic patriarchal order that identifies the masculine with reason and the feminine with the body is precisely an order that privileges the semantic with respect to the vocal” (6). In Cavarero’s imagination, to invert this hierarchy is to transform pure voice into “an essential destination” (15) of its own.

Echo as Character

“She could not / stay silent when another spoke 

nor be / the first to speak. She was resounding Echo.” 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, lines 381-84. 

In Cavarero’s theoretical framework, the Echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses models the subversive power that lies nested in sound. Echo, the nymph whom the wrathful Juno stripped of the capacity to speak, is, in the words of Cavarero, “pure phone, activated by an involuntary mechanism of resonance” (167). While Echo’s inability to speak implies subordination and passivity, Cavarero claims that the words Echo repeats, though “forced and unintentional” (166), destabilize and disrupt Ovid’s narrative, because when “separated from their context … they can appear as a response” (166). This dynamic comes to life from the first encounter between Narcissus and Echo. By repeating the last word of Narcissus’ question, “Is there someone here?” (Ovid 3.408), Echo unwittingly announces her presence to Narcissus, deceiving him with “the likeness / of alternating speech” (3.413-14). According to Cavarero, instances like these “reorganize the semantic register” (Cavarero 168) of Ovid’s tale by blurring the line between intentional language which communicates and signifies, and unintentional language which merely resounds. Cavarero’s argument implies that Echo’s sheer presence in Ovid’s tale is an insurgent force because it “dissolves the semantic register entirely” (168), challenging the Aristotelian definition of logos in favor of “pure vocal mechanism” (168).

 

In disrupting the linguistic superstructure of Ovid’s tale, Echo unveils the possibility of a new mode of expression and signals the emergence of a unique voice. Although Juno’s curse “won’t allow [Echo] to begin” (Ovid 3.404) speaking, Echo “send[s] back words of her own” (3.406) by repeating the words of Narcissus. After Echo repeats the words “be with me” (3.416), the poet recounts that “she’s pleased with her own words” (3.417). The possessive phrases “words of her own” (3.406) and “her own words” (3.417) indicate that Echo’s words, though merely reverberations, belong to Echo herself rather than to Narcissus. The sound of echo becomes a distinct mode of expression over which Echo alone has authority. In A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar argues that Narcissus loses ownership of his words once they become echoes: “the voice returned was not his own voice … it was his voice turned into the other” (Dolar 40). Echo’s reverberations strip Narcissus of control over his own words and imbue his speech with a new voice that lies beyond the realm of logos, sparking a quest for modes of communication that eclipse the boundaries of rational speech. 

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Besides subverting the “semantic register” of Ovid’s poetry, Echo challenges the temporality of the narrative, paving the way for a reshaping of time. When the poet first mentions Echo, he diverges from the past tense of the tale’s opening lines, which recount Narcissus’ origins, and shifts to the present tense in the phrase “a strange-voiced nymph beholds him” (Ovid 3.381). This abrupt transition to the present moment, after which the poet again reverts to narration in the past tense, suggests that Echo disrupts the temporal progression of the tale, collapsing the boundaries between past and present. The epithet “strange-voiced nymph” implies that Echo’s capacity to disturb the temporal linearity of the narrative is fundamentally intertwined with her voice. The original Latin adjective in this phrase is vocalis (Cambridge Latin Anthology).

 

Beyond describing the sonic quality of a voice, vocalis evokes the actions of “speaking, crying, singing” (Lewis and Short). The association between the word vocalis and the act of singing implies that like the songs of the classical muses and Homeric sirens, Echo’s echoes disturb the teleology that governs ancient epic and Ovid’s own tale. The translator’s choice to render vocalis as “strange-voiced” reinforces the siren-like, otherworldly quality of Echo’s voice. 

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As a corporeal being, Echo “does what is allowed and waits for sounds” (Ovid 3.405), remaining subordinate to time. Once Echo’s body disintegrates, however, “her voice endures” (3.428). No longer bound by the words of others or by time, Echo’s transformation into pure sound allows her to transcend the binary of past and present. Following her transformation, Echo “hides in woods” (Ovid 3.429) and “though she can’t be seen on any peak, / everyone hears her” (3.430-31). Echo’s physical withdrawal into the distant “woods” parallels her figurative escape into the “crevices” of language that female characters and writers inhabit. While this transformation frees Echo from the human gaze, for she can no longer “be seen” (3.430), it also renders her voice eternally present and discernible. Just as the words of the poet live forever, “sound still lives in [Echo]” (3.431), implying that for Echo, sound serves a kind of artistic legacy. Echo, in repeating and reshaping the words of others, unravels a new and eternal voice. Her simultaneous dependence on and remodeling of Narcissus’ words reveals the power of echo to unveil new modes of communication beyond logocentric spheres of speech.

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Echo as Allusion

“You who hear in these troubled rhymes, 

in these troubled and these dark accents, 

the sound of my amorous laments …” 

Gaspara Stampa, Rime, sonnet 1, lines 1-3; 

transl. Jane Tylus.

In the poetry of Gaspara Stampa, echo takes on a new dimension. Echo is no longer a sonic effect or a literary character, as in Ovid’s tale. Instead, echo becomes a mode of writing that seeks to both imitate and supersede the work of past artists. In his work Stravaganze, Quarte e Supreme, classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali writes that “the word is like water in a stream, which unites within itself the flavors of the rock from which it emerged and of the terrain through which it passed” (Pasquali 11, my translation). According to Pasquali, literature is at its core allusive, continually evoking stories and styles of past artists in explicit and implicit ways (12). Pasquali’s characterization of allusive art suggests that allusion resembles an echo. Inevitable and implacable, both forces carry forth the voices of others and of the past like “water in a stream,” resounding through time. Pasquali argues that most, if not all, Italian lyric poetry of the 16th century is “an infinite series of ingenious variations on a sacred book,” namely “the Canzoniere of Petrarch” (12). Stampa’s Rime, published by her loving sister after the poet’s premature and unexpected death in 1554, instantiate the inevitability of artistic allusion through their quest to imitate and transcend Petrarch’s sonnets. 

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By explicitly modeling the structure and form of her Rime on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Stampa suggests that allusive echo possesses a veiled power. Consisting of 366 poems, Petrarch’s collection apostrophizes the elusive and beloved Laura through sonnets of two quatrains and two tercets with an ABBA/ABBA CDE/CDE rhyme scheme. Stampa clings to these structural demarcations in her own Rime, with the first sonnet of her collection echoing Petrarch’s first sonnet in the Canzoniere. Like Petrarch, Stampa begins her sonnet with the second-person phrase “voi ch’ascoltate” or “you who hear” (Stampa 1.1, transl. Tylus), suggesting that despite the temporal chasm separating Stampa from her poetic predecessor, the two artists share a single audience that merits the same form of address. Both poets invite their audience to listen to not only the content of their sonnets, but to relish their sonic, disembodied quality: while Petrarch directs his listeners to the “sound of those sighs with / which [he] nourished [his] heart” (Petrarch 1.1-2, transl. Durling), Stampa underscores “the sound of [her] amorous laments” (Stampa 1.3). This emphasis on sound evokes Cavarero’s distinction between logos and phone, suggesting that both poets share a reverence for the realm of pure voice. Beyond echoing the overt structure of the Petrarchan sonnet, Stampa’s first poem is an echo of Petrarch’s poetic self-awareness and his invitation to engage in not only a verbal, but in a sonic mode of spectatorship. 

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Although Stampa’s first sonnet structurally resembles an imitation of Petrarch’s poem, it is both mimetic and subversive. While Stampa, like Petrarch, employs the word rime to characterize her own poetic project, she replaces the Petrarchan adjective sparse, which Robert M. Durling translates as “scattered” (Petrarch 1.1), with the adjectives meste and oscuri, which Tylus translates as “troubled” and “dark” (Stampa 1.2). Petrarch’s adjective refers to the stylistic qualities of rhyme, implying that they are “scattered” because they lack a single narrative thread, but it fails to infuse the rhymes with an affective or interior dimension. Stampa’s adjective, by contrast, implies that the rhymes are plagued by internal disturbances just as a “troubled” human being might be, imbuing the poems themselves with an interiority that reflects the restlessness of the poet’s own mind. In his letters, Petrarch characterizes himself as the peregrinus ubique or universal pilgrim (Wilkins 445). He therefore figures “restlessness” [inquietudine] as inseparable from his lived experience and from his writing. Stampa’s adjectives of obscurity not only echo Petrarch’s own restlessness, but suggest that such restlessness is an intrinsic feature of poetry itself. Stampa’s imitation and remodeling of Petrarch’s first sonnet exemplifies the “ingenious variations” (Pasquali 12) on Petrarchan poetry that Pasquali deems emblematic of the 16th-century Italian lyric tradition. By infusing Petrarchan conventions within a distinct, female voice, Stampa reveals the insurgent potential of echo as allusion. 

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In hinging her artistic project on an echo of Sappho’s lyric poetry, Stampa merges her evocation of Petrarch with the unveiling of a distinct voice. In her introduction to Stampa’s Rime, Tylus cites the poem’s final stanza (Tylus 21) in which Stampa’s speaker hopes that one day, “some woman” (Stampa 1.9) will admire her poetry and long to “walk side by side” (1.14) with her. Tylus argues that this unnamed woman might embody Stampa’s own yearning to “contend with” not only Petrarch, but with Sappho (Tylus 21). Tylus notes that like Sappho, Stampa was primarily known in her own time as a performer and musician who wrote her own rhymes (2). Stampa explicitly evokes the distinction between writing and singing in her sonnets. Her speaker yearns to find “the words to fit the work so [she] might / write them down and sing them” (Stampa 16.6-7), and claims that “it suits [her] always to write, and sing” (17.8). Stampa’s poetic separation of writing and singing echoes Cavarero’s separation of logos and phone. Rather than privileging one of these acts over the other, however, Stampa’s speaker seeks to excel at both, merging the two realms through her art. 

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Stampa’s poetic voice unveils the layers of echo upon which literature itself rests. Tylus’ suggestion that Stampa strives to “walk side by side with” (1.14) not only Petrarch the poet, but with Sappho the singer, implies that Stampa’s poetic voice rests on layers of echo. Her sonnets are a consciously allusive echo of the written word and of pure voice, of the poetic tradition of the early Renaissance and of the realm of classical literature that this tradition longed to revitalize. By seeking to mimic and supersede two poets of different epochs and by bridging the disparate realms of logos and phone, Stampa overcomes the boundaries of time and speech through her own voice. In giving rise to a voice that simultaneously draws inspiration from and subverts the tradition of Renaissance lyric, Stampa sheds light on the allusive power of echo. Ovid’s Echo implicitly gains a voice of her own by repeating the words of Narcissus. Similarly, Stampa works within the confines of Renaissance lyric poetry to craft a distinct poetic persona. Echo, a force that simultaneously reverberates and transforms, unites these two figures. The internal dynamic of echo is inescapably intertwined with the work of the poet and of the translator, who both sustains the language of the original and imbues it with a new life. In a 15th-century Florentine manuscript of Petrarch’s writings, displayed in an exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, a painting of Daphne and Apollo by Francesco d’Antonio del Chierico, representing a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, frames the first of Petrarch’s sonnets. The visual pairing of these two literary works suggests that the poetry of Petrarch is inseparable from that of Ovid. While Petrarch’s sonnets might not directly allude to the Metamorphoses, they inevitably echo the tales that came before them, just as the speaker of Stampa’s poems echoes Petrarch and Sappho, and just as the Echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses reverberates the sounds of the woods. Rather than signify passivity or powerlessness, echo unveils new, enduring voices.

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boccaccio-02-3.jpg

Image Source: https://gulbenkian.pt/museu/en/agenda/petrarch-and-boccaccio/ (Copyright by the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum)

​Echo underpins, enlivens, and propels the act of writing. Echo carries sonic and artistic force, capable of reshaping both sound and language. In the works of Ovid and Gaspara Stampa, echo takes on diverse dimensions and forms, appearing as character and as allusion. Across these manifestations, echo challenges temporal confines and blurs the distinction between logos and phone that Cavarero critiques in her theory of vocality. Echo liberates artistic creation from the restrictive superstructures of time and speech, unveiling new modes of expression. This act of literary liberation transforms the human voice from a sheer receptacle for language into “an essential destination” (Cavarero 15) of its own. To create, preserve, and believe in art is to trust in the power of echo. 

The author would like to thank Jane Tylus, Costanza Barchiesi, and Catherine Saterson for exposing her to many of the texts and ideas discussed in this essay through their course “Dangerous Women: Sirens, Sibyls, Singers, Poets from Sappho to Elena Ferrante.” 

Footnotes

1. A term used by Prof. Alessandro Barchiesi during a class visit in the fall of 2024.

2. Jane Tylus described Petrarch as “full of restlessness” or pieno di inquietudine.

Works Cited

Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford University

Press, 2005. 

 

Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. The MIT Press, 2006.

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“Echo et Narcissus: Latin Original.” Cambridge Latin Anthology

www.cla.cambridgescp.com/files/cscp/cla/cla/exp/cla.html?fn=echo_026_1. Accessed 9 Dec. 2023. 

 

Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. “‘Vocalis.’” A Latin Dictionary, Perseus Digital Library, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?

doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aa lphabetic+letter%3DV%3Aentry+group%3D25%3Aentry%3Dvocalis. Accessed 9 Dec. 2023. 

 

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Stephanie McCarter. Penguin Books, 2022. 

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Petrarch, Francesco. Petrarchʼs Lyric Poems: The “Rime Sparse” and Other Lyrics. Translated and edited by Robert M. Durling. Harvard

University Press, 2005. 

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Pasquali, Giorgio. Stravaganze Quarte e Supreme. Neri Pozza, 1951. 

https://archive.org/details/pasquali-stravaganze-quarte-supreme. 

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Stampa, Gaspara. The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition. Translated by Jane Tylus. Edited by Troy Tower

and Jane Tylus. University of Chicago Press, 2010. 

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Tylus, Jane. “Volume Editors’ Introduction.” The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition. By Gaspara Stampa.

Translated by Jane Tylus. Edited by Troy Tower and Jane Tylus. University of Chicago Press, 2010. 1-45. 

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Wilkins, Ernest H. “Peregrinus Ubique.” Studies in Philology, vol. 45, no. 3, 1948, pp. 445–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172852.

Accessed 28 June 2024.

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