Canzoniere E-Book

Francesco Petrarch

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Canzoniere of Petrarch (1304-74) is among Europe's most famous and influential books of lyrics. The focus of this large collection (7,500 lines) is Petrarch's lifelong love for the mysterious Laura, but the themes he treats are many and various. Often regarded as the first modern man to emerge from a mediaeval world, Petrarch remains modern in his perplexities, uncertainties, the hesitancies and diffidence he reveals, paradoxically, with assured artistry. J.G. Nichols brings out the obsessive passion, but also his wit and serious humour: The saying's all too true: we lose our hair but not our habits; and our failing sense does not make mortal feelings less intense. The shade our bodies cast is guilty here. from 'Poem 122' This is a rare event - a new verse translation of the whole of the Canzoniere, with notes on the page which illuminate difficulties and suggest the many connections between the poems. They are not randomly collected; they constitute a complex whole which continues to disclose new aspects as we look from different angles. Even those poems which have long been famous in the English of Wyatt and Surrey gain when read in context.

Leseprobe

Petrarch

CANZONIERE

translated by J.G. Nichols

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART 1 Poems written in the lifetime of madonna Laura

PART 2

Poems written after the death of madonna Laura

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I have translated Petrarch’s Canzoniere from the edition by Gianfranco Contini (Einaudi, Turin, 1964), with frequent reference to the commentaries in the editions by Guido Bezzola (Rizzoli, Milan, second edition, 1985), Alberto Chiari (Mondadori, Rome, 1985), Piero Cudini (Garzanti, Milan, eleventh edition, 1992), Ugo Dotti (with Giacomo Leopardi’s commentary, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1979), and Robert M. Durling (with English prose translation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. and London, second impression, 1979).

The three critical works in English which I have found most interesting and useful are: Kenelm Foster, Petrarch, Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh University Press, 1984); Peter Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet (Routledge, London and New York, 1988); Nicholas Mann, Petrarch (Oxford University Press, 1984).

My version of poem 164 has already been published in Translation and Literature, Volume 5, Part 1 (1996) in an anthology of versions of this poem from the last four and a half centuries.

I wish to thank Mr C.J. Hunt for permission to use the John Rylands University Library, Manchester.

Introduction

FRANCESCO PETRARCA

Although I very much doubt whether my obscure little name can have reached you across such a gap of time and space, it is possible that you have some inkling of me, and perhaps you would like to know what sort of man I was, and what became of my works, especially those which you know only by repute.

Francesco Petrarca, To Posterity

Despite the apparent modesty of that passage, Petrarch was quite certain that he was someone special, and he always found himself fascinating. What is more important, his copious writings continue to convey this fascination to us across a gap of more than six hundred years. What he has to say about himself is infinitely more interesting than what anyone else has to say about him. Nevertheless, reading him must involve us in one of his own favourite occupations – attempting to understand the past. And that requires some information. A select ad hoc chronology may help:

1304

20 July: Francesco born in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, where his parents have gone after being exiled from Florence two years before. (In 1304 Dante is thirty-nine and shortly to begin the writing of his Divine Comedy.)

1313

The family move to Avignon. This is during the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Papal Court in that city, which lasts from 1309 to 1377 and is a great cause of scandal throughout Western Christendom. (1313 is the year of Boccaccio’s birth.)

1327

6 April: Petrarch’s first sight of Laura, in the Church of Saint Clare in Avignon.

1336

Petrarch and his brother Gherardo make their famous ascent of Mont Ventoux in Provence: their ascent is famous because of Petrarch’s account of it, in which his clumsy attempts to reach the peak with the least trouble to himself are contrasted with his brother’s determined ascent by the shortest, even if hardest way – an implicit allegory of the spiritual life. In the later 1330s Petrarch starts making the collection of his Italian poems which is now known usually as his Canzoniere (‘collection of lyrics’). He continues to work at this collection until his death.

1337–41

Petrarch’s first stay in Vaucluse, near the source of the River Sorgue. The village on the spot where he lived is now known as Fontaine-de-Vaucluse (to distinguish it from the region to which it has given the name Vaucluse); it is still a remote place, dominated, as in Petrarch’s day, by the huge rock which closes it off at one end, from which the Sorgue seems to rise, and by the Sorgue itself, a considerable river.

1341

On Easter Sunday Petrarch crowned with laurel on the Capitoline Hill and declared a Roman citizen.

1345–7

Second stay in Vaucluse. (Chaucer born in London in the early 1340s.)

1348

6 April: Laura dies in Avignon, a victim of the Black Death. (The same plague, in Florence, is the background to Boccaccio’s Decameron.)

1350

On a visit to Florence Petrarch meets Boccaccio and forms a lifelong friendship.

1353

Makes his home in Italy, where he lives until his death.

1374

18 July: dies and is buried at Arquà (now Arquà Petrarca), a few miles south of Padua in the Euganean Hills.

This chronology is very brief, of course. More important than its omissions, however, are those details which may well not be historically accurate, and yet have been included. For instance, Petrarch himself is careful to tell us, more than once, that he first saw Laura on Good Friday 6 April 1327: that cannot be correct, since Good Friday did not fall on 6 April that year. This is not a quibble: Petrarch makes great play with this date (and, incidentally, the very hour of the day) and is unlikely to have been simply careless. When he tells us that Laura died twenty-one years later at the same hour, on the same day of the month, it becomes obvious that what we have here is neither truth, nor lies, nor error, but fiction. There are, of course, similar coincidences in Dante’s account in his Vita nuova of his relations with Beatrice. And there are other events in Petrarch’s life which seem just as surprising: the arrival, from both the University of Paris and the Senate of Rome, and on the very same day, of invitations to be crowned poet laureate, is a glaring instance. Unless we are ready to assume there was a greater frequency of coincidence in the trecento than there is now, we must accept that Petrarch, like Dante, worked up what had happened in his life, or what he had arranged to happen, or even what had not happened, and presented it with an air of truth. This need not worry us, I suggest, unless we are concerned with history. To establish, in so far as that can be done, what actually happened, what is objectively true, is of course as valid a procedure with the life of Petrarch as it is with anything else; but it is a historical procedure, not a literary one.

In this country at least, Petrarch’s is, after Dante’s, the best-known name in Italian literature. He may almost be said to have two reputations. On the one hand we learn at school that he is among the greatest Christian humanists Europe has ever produced, even that he is the protohumanist, the man who started the Renaissance single-handed, the first modern man of letters; and this estimate is usually accepted without demur; after all, how many have the scholarship to argue? On the other hand there is his reputation, usually felt to be much more interesting to us now, as a lyric poet. Here we may feel that we are on surer ground because – even if we have no Italian – we can read and enjoy some of the fine adaptations of his work into English. Wyatt’s are perhaps the best known, Surrey’s are certainly the best, and there are many other poets – all of the Elizabethan sonneteers for instance – whose work is unimaginable without Petrarch somewhere behind it, even if a very long way behind it.

In a time like ours – when a poet is more likely to be seen, and to see himself, as an instinctive being than as a poeta doctus – some may find it difficult to reconcile the two notions: the heavyweight man of letters and the writer of melancholy sonnets, exquisite but somewhat slight. For that is how they must often seem. This is partly because the most capable translators of Petrarch have Englished only a few of his poems, often the most straightforward ones, and the same ones are done again and again. Another reason is that the immense fame of Petrarch, which has endured for hundreds of years, has led writers at times to a reaction of disparagement. Sir Philip Sidney’s famous side-swipe at ‘poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes’ is a good-humoured example. Some later poets may sound more appreciative of him, but really speak with less knowledge and also with a certain sentimentality, quite unsuitable for this most unsentimental of poets. Keats’s mention of

lovely Laura in her light green dress

and faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned

is accurate and laudatory, but gives no impression of what Petrarch’s work is really like. Wordsworth, in his poem ‘Scorn not the sonnet’, is also sympathetic, but does not give any notion of the intellectual energy there is in Petrarch’s vernacular poetry:

the melody

of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound.

Byron, while much less respectful, makes a shrewder comment, and one, I think, that Petrarch himself would have understood and appreciated:

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

he would have written sonnets all his life?

Outwardly Petrarch was one of the most fortunate of writers. His parents were Florentines, banished from that city in 1302 in the same political purge which saw Dante begin those restless and unhappy wanderings over Italy which were to last until his death. Exile from his parents’ native city was never for Petrarch what it was for Dante, a deep tragedy in that he had lost forever the one place where he truly belonged, but was rather an opportunity to enjoy freedom from civic duties and have the leisure necessary for literary work. At the same time, although he was born in Arezzo, and then brought up from the age of eight in Provence, he was able to claim, as he always did with pardonable intellectual snobbery, that he was a Florentine. He was able to to travel during his youth, in order to improve his education, and throughout his life he went where inclination and the desire for knowledge and understanding took him. Success came early: he was not only crowned with laurel in Rome at a time when much of his best work was still unwritten, but was able to refuse a coincident offer of the same honour from the University of Paris. He was never without the means to live, drawing an income as a cleric (without performing the duties) and enjoying the patronage of the rich and powerful, which – he is careful to tell us – he never sought. His fame spread throughout Europe during his life and did not diminish after his death. He was fortunate even in his choice of languages to write in. His Latin writings won him his contemporary international reputation; more gradually he acquired an equal reputation for his poems in the vernacular, and that he has kept until this day.

PETRARCH’S CANZONIERE

Laura, renowned for her own virtues and so long celebrated in my poems, was first seen by me in my early manhood, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of Saint Clare, Avignon, in the morning hour; and in the same city in the same month of April on the same sixth day at the same first hour of the morning, but in the year 1348, was that light taken from the light of day, when I as it happened was in Verona, unaware, alas, of my fate. The sorrowful news, however, reached me in Parma the same year… (A note made by Petrarch in his copy of Virgil)

The Canzoniere is a complicated work. For a collection of lyrics it is very long (more than seven and a half thousand lines), and yet Petrarch’s labour over more than thirty years in revising, rejecting at times, arranging, rearranging, and even in making sure the poems were correctly copied out has resulted in work of a remarkably consistent quality. On the surface the poems usually seem to be quite straightforward, and the reader of the Italian is likely to enjoy first the smooth and subtle rhythms, the simple and dignified diction, the unfaltering and highly satisfying working out of the themes – in short, that sheer poetical mastery which so appealed to English Renaissance poets, and which makes many modern readers automatically suspicious. But just beneath the surface, and easily seen through the surface transparency, there are endless doubts and complexities in this cycle of poems, whose meaning shifts about and alters according to the angle from which we look at it, and indeed according to which poem we happen to be looking at, for we have here, after all, not one but three hundred and sixty-six poems.

Despite the length and variety of the Canzoniere, and despite Petrarch’s own mock-modest description of the poems as rime sparse (scattered rhymes), it is unquestionably a unified collection. The poems divide themselves into those written in vita di madonna Laura and those written in morte di madonna Laura, although it should be noted that, while Petrarch himself made that division clearly in the manuscript on which our modern editions are based, the titles of the two parts were attached to them after his death: I have used them in my translation because they are a great convenience in considering such a vast body of lyrical poems. But the unity of the Canzoniere lies deeper than this, in the recurrence of the same themes, with apparently endless variations, and in the fascinating personality of the author, who becomes more tantalisingly elusive the more he tells us about himself. We learn very much about Petrarch (someone of whom we feel we can hardly know too much), but most we learn how complex Petrarch is, and ultimately how mysterious, even to himself.

It is by no means obvious how these poems should best be approached. Few readers would wish, or even have the energy, to start with the first and read them all in the order in which they are presented. It is true that the first poem, with its address to the reader,

You who can hear in scattered rhymes the sound

of all that sighing which once fed my heart

in my first youthful error, when in part

I was a person of a different kind…

serves as introduction, and true also that the next two poems describe Petrarch’s first sight of Laura, which might lead one to presume a chronological order; but one is soon disabused: the first poem is clearly to be understood as having been written long after the events to which it refers, the seventh poem is one of those not concerned with Laura at all, and the dominant tendency of the collection – to return again and again to a few events and themes – soon becomes obvious. Petrarch’s almost pedantic or journalistic insistence on the precise time when he first saw Laura,

In thirteen-twenty-seven, the very first

hour of the day, April the sixth, I went

into the labyrinth with no way out, (poem 211.12–14)

and his insistence on the precise time when she died,

in thirteen-forty-eight,

the sixth of April, in the day’s first hour,

her blessed soul departed from her body, (poem 336.12–14)

and the mention of several anniversaries, are all evidence, not so much of careful documentation, as of obsession.

Those with some knowledge of the Italian will probably look first at their own favourites and see how they have been translated. Others may compare the different renderings of poems of which there are already famous translations, such as poem 189, translated by Wyatt, or poem 145, translated by Surrey. And why not?

There are, however, many other approaches. For instance, to read first poem 52, with its strong eroticism, and then to read poem 62, a deeply religious poem, is not just to see something of the variety of which Petrarch is capable, but also to be led perhaps to a consideration of the central theme of the Canzoniere: the conflict between his love for Laura and his desire for salvation. Petrarch was a deeply religious man. True, he is no mystic; and he shows little taste for theology, except the moral kind. Nevertheless, he is a believer, interested above all in right action. He is the perpetual backslider, the man with big moral ideas which he does not realise, someone who can be sympathised with by anyone who has ever failed to keep a firmly made resolution, in other words all of us. Yet there is no enjoyment of his own faults, none of that wallowing in the contemplation of one’s badness so often found in confessional writings, and so neatly mocked by Auden:

Yet the noble despair of the poets

Is nothing of the sort; it is silly

To refuse the tasks of time

And, overlooking our lives,

Cry – ‘Miserable wicked me,

How interesting I am.’

Petrarch’s dissection of his own shortcomings is cool, precise, and unsentimental, and it achieves – like Augustine’s Confessions, which he so much admired – what might well seem impossible, a self-portrait of a genius which is also a portrait of Everyman.

Petrarch is no easier to translate than any other poet. His rhyme-schemes are hard to transpose into English, a language where rhymes are so much scarcer than in Italian. In translating him at any length it is, I think, necessary to simplify the rhyme-schemes. The use of half-rhymes in the English seems advisable also, and not too bad in its results, because half-rhymes are generally as noticeable in English as full rhymes are in Italian, where their frequency somewhat lessens their force.

That word-play which is so important a part of the original poses more serious problems. For instance, Petrarch is as concerned with the hope of literary fame as he is with Laura, and, because Laura’s name is reminiscent of lauro (laurel), the desire for Laura and the desire for fame play into each other’s hands poetically, so that sometimes it is hard to know which comes first in Petrarch’s mind. This is not just a matter of clear and obvious puns which the translator must either render as best he can or simply omit, but often of hints, nods, and winks: Laura makes him think of laurel, and laurel makes him think of Laura, and both words, or connected ones, occur so often as to add strongly to the already obsessive tone of the collection. There is even a sort of indirect punning, as in

I should be able to endure all winds

because one breath of wind between two rivers

shut me among such lovely green and ice… (Poem 66.31–3)

This is a translation of

Ben debbo io perdonare a tutti vènti,

per amor d’un che ’n mezzo di duo fiumi

mi chiuse tra ’l bel verde e ’l dolce ghiaccio…

In the Italian a word for wind is vento, used here in the plural (venti) and referred to in the second line merely by the indefinite article; the reader is obliged to make a connection between vento and the unused word l’aura (breath of wind) and then go on to think of Laura. The translation of the simple un (the indefinite article) by ‘one breath of wind’ is intended to connect with a line from another poem where I have included part of the Italian with my translation in order to suggest the sort of resonances I have been discussing:

Ne l’età sua piú bella et piú fiorita,

quando aver suol Amor in noi piú forza,

lasciando in terra la terrena scorza,

è l’aura mia vital da me partita,

et viva et bella et nuda al ciel salita…

becomes

In the best season of our earthly span,

when Love reputedly is lord of all,

she left behind on earth her earthly shell;

she, ‘l’aura mia’, my breath of life, has gone

up lively lovely naked to the skies… (Poem 278.1–5)

Figures of arrangement and figures of meaning – chiasmus and oxymoron for instance – pose less of a problem. The over-use of such figures is often characterised now by the adjective ‘Petrarchan’. Petrarch’s use of them is probably one reason for the speed and apparent ease with which his influence spread throughout Europe: unlike puns for instance, such figures are readily transposable from one language into another. (The same thing is true of course of the Psalms, whose dominant figure is parallelism, a parallelism of thought and therefore readily translatable.) Unfortunately for the translator, these features of Petrarch’s style are neither the most impressive of his qualities nor, indeed, quite so common as is often thought.

The greatest difficulty these poems pose to the translator is simply their conciseness. It is a commonplace among English speakers that Italian is a musical language, and Petrarch is far from disappointing us in this respect, and such musicality is hard to carry over. But the last thing an English translator expects to have to face is language which makes his own seem at times diffuse. For all the boasted conciseness of Latin, it is no more concise than English, that is if we compare the languages according to the number of syllables they use, as distinct from the number of words. With French there is often a feeling that the English has even to be stretched a little to fit. With Petrarch, on the other hand, the translator finds himself again and again near to despair when he sees how much he has to include, if possible without obvious cramming, into a single line, and sees how Petrarch, again and again and without apparent effort, produces what in the English Renaissance were known as ‘strong lines’. A simple instance is at the beginning of one of the most famous sonnets of the Canzoniere:

The Column and the Laurel-tree are broken

that lent their cooling shade to my tired mind;

what I have lost I never hope to find

from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. (Poem 269.1–4)

The fourth line there is a translation of ‘dal borrea a l’austro, o dal mar indo al mauro’ (from the north wind to the south wind, or from the Indian to the Mauretanian sea) – a simplification indeed!

The greatest shortcoming of which I am conscious in my translations is this tendency to a simplification of the originals with their abundant suggestiveness. On the other hand, I hope that this version of the whole of the Canzoniere may help readers to see how the poems support each other, and are played off against each other. There are always fresh details to discover even in poems which are not those most usually admired. It is obvious, for instance, that poem 41 is making use of the pathetic fallacy (the weather is bad because Laura is away), and that poem 42 is again making use of the pathetic fallacy (the weather has cleared up because Laura has returned); but a new light is cast on both of these poems when we read poem 43 where the pathetic fallacy is that there is no pathetic fallacy (the sun remains so upset by Laura’s absence that he has failed to notice her return and celebrate it by shining). There is a certain playfulness and wit here: the Canzoniere has more variety of tone in it than is often allowed.

However, when all is said and done, Petrarch continues to attract so many readers for the same reason as other great poets do: he conveys feelings everyone can recognise. This is very obvious in the sonnets written after Laura’s death, with their plangent melancholy and regret, and they are perhaps the best poems with which to begin the reading of the Canzoniere:

This short-lived and this fragile happiness,

wind and shadow indeed, beauty by name,

was never all compact, but in our time,

within one body, and to my distress,

since Nature does not wish, nor is it fair,

to make one rich at the expense of others:

and yet, forgive me: she had all God’s treasures,

you who are beautiful, or think you are.

Never such beauty, even in old days,

nor ever will be… (poem 350.1–10).

PART I

Poems written in the lifetime of madonna Laura

1Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono

You who can hear in scattered rhymes the sound

of all that sighing which once fed my heart

in my first youthful error, when in part

I was a person of a different kind –

my changing manner as I weep and reason,

between vain aspiration and vain grief,

leads everyone who has known love himself

to sympathise, I hope, not merely pardon.

And yet I was, I do now realise,

10 for long a common laughing-stock, so that

often inside myself I feel deep shame –

the bitter fruit of wild and wandering cries,

repentance, and the knowledge out of doubt

that all this world loves is a fleeting dream.

2Per fare una leggiadra sua vendetta

To wreak what sweet revenge is his to wreak,

and punish all offences at one blow,

Love unobtrusively took up his bow,

and seized his opportunity to strike.

My forces had withdrawn into my heart

to make both there and in my eyes their stand;

and then I felt the fatal blow descend,

when arrows all before had fallen short.

Caught in confusion at the first attack,

10 my heart had not the energy or time

to take up arms now there was every need,

and did not have the wit to pull me back

onto a safer height from certain doom;

and cannot, now he wants to, lend me aid.

2 all offences: against the power of Love by resisting him.

3Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro

It was the day Apollo’s rays turned pale

in sympathy with their Creator’s plight,

when I, who wandered unaware, was caught,

and came, my lady, under your control.

That did not seem a time to be on guard

against the blows of Love; so I went by,

careless, suspicionless: my misery

began beside the woe of all the world.

Love came upon me quite unarmed, the heart

10 by neither of my eyes defensible

(now merely conduits for my tears to flow).

I think it did not honour him at all

to hit me with an arrow in that state:

to you well armed not even flaunt his bow.

1 Apollo’s rays turned pale: the eclipse at the time of the Crucifixion.

4Que’ ch’infinita providentia et arte

He Who reveals His providence and art

as infinite in all His wonders here,

creating this and the other hemisphere,

and Jupiter more mild than ever Mars,

Who, down to earth in order to shed light

on pages which for aeons hid the truth,

saw John and Peter fishing, took them both,

and in His heavenly kingdom gave them part;

when He was born did not do Rome the grace,

10 Judea rather, such was His delight,

as ever, to exalt humility;

now from a village sends a shining light,

whence we thank nature and the little place

where such a lovely lady came to be.

4 Jupiter…Mars: as planets, in their influence.

6 pages: the Old Testament prophecies.

12 a village: Laura’s birthplace is unknown.

5Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi

When I begin to send out sighs and call

the name that Love has written in my heart,

once the LAUdation’s coming out we start

to hear the sound of its first syllable.

Your REgal state, the next thing that occurs,

adds to the boldness of the enterprise;

but the end is, ‘Do not TAlk in her praise –

a burden for a broader back than yours.’

So LAUd and REverence are taught to us

10 by your mere name, when called by anyone,

O lady worthy of such eminence:

unless Apollo takes it all amiss

since, if it speaks about his evergreen,

a morTAL tongue becomes presumptuous.

3, 5, 7, 9, 14: A Latin form of Laura’s name is used.

13 his evergreen: the laurel (lauro in Italian, and often identified by Petrarch with Laura), sacred to Apollo and a symbol of poetry.

6Sí travïato è ’l folle mi’ desio

My mad desire has strayed so far, and strays,

pursuing her whose back is turned in flight,

who, unconstrained by ties of love, flies light

and easily ahead of my slow pace,

that when I call it back and try to guide

it by safe ways, it simply pays less heed;

I try to use the spur, or turn its head,

but Love has made its nature far too wild.

And now it has the bit between its teeth

10 desire is left to lord it over me,

bearing me off to death against my will:

only to reach at last the laurel-wreath

whose bitter fruit and taste are misery

to victims they do little to console.

7La gola e ’l somno et l’otïose piume

Gluttony, sleep, swans-down of idleness

send virtue into exile far away;

human nature goes more or less astray,

driven distracted by such banal vice;

and all those beneficial lights have gone

out in the sky, which governed every change,

till he is pointed out as something strange

who hopes to draw a stream from Helicon.

What longing for the bays? the myrtle bough?

10 ‘Philosophy, you’re poor and bare indeed,’

is what folk say, thinking of how it pays.

Few friends you’ll find along this other road.

So all the more, friend, I implore you now

not to abandon your great enterprise.

9 myrtle bough: love poetry.

8A pie’ de’ colli ove la bella vesta

Under the very hills where at the first

she donned that lovely dress, her earthly form

(that lady who so often rouses him

who sends us to you, weeping from his rest)

we went in peace and liberty through this

our mortal life, where people wish to stay,

without a thought of coming in the way

of something fashioned to entangle us.

For all this wretched state where we now find

10 ourselves, whose former life was so serene,

some comfort (and for death) is still at hand:

that is, vengeance on him who brought us down,

who, also in extremis, now lies bound

like all of us, but with a heavier chain.

This poem is spoken by some game which Petrarch had caught and sent as a gift.

9Quando ’l pianeta che distingue l’ore

When that planet which divides the hours

comes back to stay with Taurus for a while,

then from the Bull’s bright horns see virtue fall

and clothe our world in colourful fresh flowers.

Not just the world apparent from outside,

the river-banks and hills, receives the sun,

but there within where day is never born

earth’s moisture is made pregnant with the light,

the very reason for such fruits as these.

10 So she, the sunlight of all womanhood,

turning the brightness of her eyes my way,

ensures that thoughts, acts, words of love are bred;

and yet, however she may turn her eyes,

spring is a season I shall never see.

1 that planet: the sun.

2 The sun is in Taurus between April and May.

9 such fruits as these: presumably truffles, sent as a gift.

10Glorïosa columna in cui s’appoggia

Column of glory, strong stay and support

of all our hope and of the Latin name,

whom Jove’s loud wrath, expressed in wind and rain,

has never driven from the right way yet,

no theatre here, loggia, or palaces,

but in their stead a fir, a pine, a beech,

green grass, a mountain within easy reach

to wander up and down as we compose,

suffice to elevate the intellect;

10 while the sweet nightingale that in the shade

spends all the dark deploring her distress

keeps every loving heart preoccupied.

Yet all this good you spoil with one defect,

keeping yourself, my lord, so far from us.

1 Column of glory: Stefano Colonna, head of a powerful Roman family. One of his sons, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, was Petrarch’s patron.

3 Jove’s loud wrath: the enmity of Pope Boniface VIII.

5 here: probably Lombez in the Pyrenees where another of Stefano Colonna’s sons, Giacomo, was Bishop.

11Lassare il velo o per sole o per ombra

I have not seen you lay your veil apart

in sunlight or in shade

from when you first saw what desire I had

driving all other wishes from my heart.

While I still kept such thoughts well locked away,

which have destroyed my mind in its desire,

I saw your face adorned with sympathy;

but from the moment Love made you aware

you’ve kept your lovely blond hair veiled from me,

10 and kept your love-arousing eyes cast down.

Now what I most desire has been withdrawn,

and in both heat and cold,

and fatally for me, you still keep veiled

those eyes that once delighted with their light.

12Se la mia vita da l’aspro tormento

Now should my life endure to this extent

against the bitter torment and the tears,

that, as a consequence of your last years,

I saw your eyes with all their brightness spent,

your hair shade into silver from pure gold,

your garlands laid aside, your verdant dress,

and all the colour fade out of that face

which makes me slow to murmur, terror-filled:

then Love would so embolden me I’d come

10 and put in front of you the years, the days,

the hours, the minutes of my martyrdom;

and, though desire is something time destroys,

I might receive, to mitigate my gloom,

what sympathy there is in tardy sighs.

13Quando fra l’altre donne ad ora ad ora

When out of all the ladies in her sphere

Love comes and makes his dwelling in her face,

their beauty grows spectacularly less

and my desire for her grows more and more.

I bless the place, the season, and the hour

I raised my eyes to such an altitude;

I tell my soul: ‘Show God some gratitude

for being honoured as you so much are!

‘From her derives that loving tendency

10 which, while you go with it, makes you aspire,

little desiring what most men desire;

‘from her derives that influential air

leading you up to heaven the straightest way;

in hope of which I follow happily.’

14Occhi miei lassi, mentre ch’io vi giro

While I still keep you turned, though tired, my eyes,

upon the face of her who strikes you dead,

enjoy the time allowed,

for Love throws down a challenge; hence my sighs.

Nothing but death can close against my thoughts

the loving road they always move along

towards their longed-for haven of salvation;

and yet, my eyes, the light for which you long

may hide itself from you for much less reason,

10 since by your nature you are not so strong.

And so, though sad, before the time has come

to part, which is already on its way,

take comfort while you may

against a lengthy future martyrdom.

8 the light: Laura.

15Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo

At every step, I find I must look back;

my weariness is hardly to be borne;

you breathe some distant comfort; I go on;

with only this complaint: ‘Alas, alack!’

At last, recalling all the good I’m leaving,

the road so long, and so few years to go,

I halt (my footsteps were already slow)

and drop my eyes to earth in open grieving.

Sometimes above my loud complaints there hovers

10 one serious doubt: how can these limbs of mine

be living, and their spirit far away?

Then Love replies: ‘Do you not call to mind

this is the privilege reserved for lovers,

not tied to earthly things, at liberty?’

16Movesi il vecchierel canuto et biancho

The little white-haired man moves off from where

he has so happily lived out his days,

and from his family whom it dismays

to see their dear old father disappear;

and dragging thence his ancient back and side,

with only good will left, he takes himself

over the final stages of his life,

bent by the years, and weary of the road,

and reaches Rome, to follow out his wish

10 to gaze upon the image of that One

Whom he will see in heaven, such is his hope:

just so, alas, from time to time I search,

trying, so far as anybody can,

to see in others your true longed-for shape.

10 the image of that One: the likeness of Christ’s face, believed to have been left upon the cloth with which Saint Veronica wiped it when He was on His way to Calvary; it is a relic in Saint Peter’s, Rome.

17Piovonmi amare lagrime dal viso

I feel the bitter rain of tears distilled,

the rushing wind made up of anxious sighs,

each time it happens that I turn my eyes

to you who sever me from all the world.

That gentle smile of yours, admittedly,

can tame my most intransigent desires,

and draw me safely out of martyrs’ fires,

so long as I observe you steadily;

but then my spirits fail, being chilled right through,

10 whenever I observe those fatal stars

turn all their countenance away from me.

Once set at large, like all freed prisoners

my soul runs from me; but it follows you;

and then slows to a walk, more thoughtfully.

10 fatal stars: Laura’s eyes.

18Quand’io son tutto vòlto in quella parte

When I have stared for some time fixedly

there where madonna’s face throws out a light,

until my mind is so absorbed by light

I seem to burn and slowly melt away,

then, fearful for the breaking of my heart,

and fearful for the fading of my light,

I go like one who’s blind or has no light,

who is directionless, yet must depart.

Under the battery of such deadly blows

10 I run away, but not so fast desire

does not go with me, as his custom is;

I go in silence, for one fatal phrase

from me would make men weep, while I desire

simply to shed some solitary tears.

19Son animali al mondo de sí altera

There are some creatures in the world with eyes

so very strong they fly into the sun;

others which are so troubled by the sun

they never issue till the daylight dies;

and others still, so crazy that they hope

for happiness in fire, because it shines,

and find its other property – it burns.

Alas, I fall into this final group.

I’m neither able to withstand the light

10 that issues from this lady, nor to take

refuge in shady places, or late hours.

And, though my eyes are weeping and are weak,

destiny always leads me to her sight;

and leads me like a martyr to the fires.

20Vergognando talor ch’ancor si taccia

Sometimes I am ashamed that I have never

managed to fix your beauty in my verse;

I think of when I saw that beauty first,

such that nobody else would please me ever,

and find a weight too great for me to shoulder,

a work not to be finished by my skill;

the more I try, the more I’m sceptical,

and feel my first warm confidence grow colder.

My mouth has opened very many times,

10 only to find articulation blocked.

Could anybody scale perfection’s peak?

I have begun so very many rhymes;

but then my pen, my hand, my intellect

defeated in their first assault fell back.

21Mille fïate, o dolce mia guerrera

I have a thousand times, dear enemy,

in order to have peace with your bright eyes,

offered my heart to you, which you refuse.

Why should you look so low, whose thoughts fly high?

If any others have some hopes of him

(my heart) they’re feeble and delusory;

while he (I scorn what you scorn) cannot be

ever again to me what he has been.

Should I expel him, not to find in you

10 succour in his calamitous exile,

nor stand alone, nor ever go elsewhere,

I think his natural course of life would fail;

and all the guilt would fall upon us two,

but more on you, since he loves you the more.

22A qualunque animale alberga in terra

For every living creature on this earth,

except the very few that loathe the sun,

the time for labour is throughout the day;

but, when the sky illuminates its stars,

some turn back home and some nest in the wood,

reposing there at least until the dawn.

And I, from that time when the glorious dawn

begins to shake the shadows from the earth,

waking the creatures up in every wood,

10 never have truce from sighs under the sun;

and when I see the flaming of the stars

I walk and weep in longing for the day.

When evening chases off the shining day,

and shades of ours bring other people dawn,

I, full of thought, gaze at the cruel stars

which formed my body out of feeling earth;

I curse the day when first I saw the sun;

I look like someone raised in a wild wood.

I think there never pastured through a wood

20 a creature quite so fierce, by night or day,

as she whom I must weep in shade and sun,

not ceasing in first sleep or at the dawn,

for, though a mortal body made from earth,

I fetch my steady longing from the stars.

Before I turn again to you, bright stars,

or fall down in the lovers’ myrtle wood,

leaving my body here as dusty earth,

might I find pity in her! In one sole day

make up for many years, and before dawn

30 enrich me from the setting of the sun!

Could I be with her from the setting sun,

not to be seen by any but the stars,

only one night, one night without a dawn!

And she not be transformed into green wood

to escape my arms, as happened on that day

Apollo hunted her upon this earth!

I shall be under earth and in dry wood,

and the day pass picked out in little stars,

before so sweet a dawn comes with the sun.

26 myrtle wood: where the shades are of those ‘whom harsh love consumed with cruel wasting’ (Aeneid vi.442–4).

34 green wood: laurel, a play on Laura’s name.

23Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade

The happy season of my early prime,

time of the birth and immaturity

of harsh desire which grew up to my harm,

is now – since grief is felt less bitterly

when sung – my theme: my life in liberty

while Love was there to be looked down upon.

And I shall say how he, hurt by my scorn,

and deeply too, managed to make of me

a fine example of unhappiness;

10 and this though my distress

is written elsewhere, and a thousand pens

worn out with writing it, and every vale,

almost, re-echoes to the heavy sighs

which make my troubles so believable.

And if here memory does not help as much

as once it did, then blame these dreadful days,

and that one thought which is alone so bitter

it makes me turn my back on every other,

losing remembrance of myself as well:

20 it rules what is inside, I but the shell.

I say that, from the time the first attacks

were made by Love, so many years had fled

that I had almost lost my youthful looks,

and freezing thoughts around my heart had made

a covering of adamant enamel

not faulted by the slightest flaw or crack;

the tears were not yet running down my cheek,

or stealing sleep; and what I did not feel,

when seen in others seemed a miracle.

30 What happened, after all?

Its end the life, the evening crowns the day.

That cruel combatant of whom I speak,

seeing at last that not one shot of his

had passed beyond my clothing, looked for aid,

and found an ally in a powerful lady

against whom reason never was or is

of any help, or begging, or brute force;

the two performed this metamorphosis:

made me, a living man, a laurel-tree,

40 which sheds no leaves however cold it be.

Oh, what a sight I was when first I noticed

my wretched person altered utterly;

and saw my hair become the very foliage

I always hoped would make a wreath for me;

and my two feet on which I stand, move, run,

(since, as the soul is, so each limb behaves)

transformed into twin roots beside the waves

not of Peneus but a prouder river;

and my two arms converted into branches!

50 And still the memory blenches:

for then I grew a cover of white plumes,

when hope was thunderstruck and lay for dead

because it had presumed to mount too high;

since I, who had no notion where or when

I might retrieve it, weeping and alone

went wandering where I lost it night and day,

searching the banks and searching in the stream;

and I was never silent from that time

about hope’s fatal fall, till I took on,

60 with a swan’s voice, the colour of a swan.

And so I walked along the charming river,

and when I tried to speak I always found

that I was singing in an alien voice,

failing to make my amorous woes resound

in such a soothing and delightful manner

her hard ferocious heart ever relented.

Think of that pain! how I am still tormented!

Yet there is so much more I have to tell

about my sweet and bitter enemy

70 than ever previously,

though she is such she goes beyond all telling.

She whose mere glance can steal the minds of men

opened my breast, and took my heart in hand,

and warned: ‘You must not say a word of this.’

Later I saw her, strangely dressed, alone,

and did not know her – oh my foolish mind! –

and told her all the truth, though timidly;

whereupon she – returning rapidly

to her accustomed shape – she made me turn

80 into a half-alive terrified stone.

She said to me – and in an angry manner

that made me shake with terror in my rock –

‘I am perhaps not what you think I am.’

I thought: ‘If she unrocks me from my rock,

then no life will be sad or troublesome;

come back, my Lord, I beg, and let me weep.’

I don’t know how, and yet I moved my feet,

blaming nobody but my very self,

all of that day caught between death and life.

90 The time allowed is brief:

how can my pen keep pace with my good will?

Various details written in my mind

I must leave out, and only speak of some

to make the one who hears them stand and marvel.

My heart was circled round by Death himself;

I could not rescue it by staying dumb,

or give my failing faculties some aid;

I was forbidden to speak words aloud;

so out I shouted in clear black and white:

100 ‘I am not mine. If I die, you lose out!’

I really thought to make my wretched self

in her eyes fit for mercy in this way.

That was the hope which made me overbold.

But scorn, extinguished by humility

at times, at times flares up; so I discovered,

left as I was in darkness for so long,

for at those prayers my light had simply gone.

And I, not finding – how I looked around! –

her shadow or her footprint anywhere,

110 like a tired traveller

just threw myself one day upon the grass.

Arraigning from down there the elusive ray,

I let my sad tears run and run and run,

allowing them to fall as they thought best;

never did snow in sunbeams melt away

as I discovered I was melting down

into a fountain underneath a beech.

A long time too my humid course was such.

Who ever heard of springs springing from men?

120 Yet what I tell you happened is well-known.

The soul, whose nobleness is all from God,

since no one else could ever grant such grace,

maintains a disposition like its Maker’s:

whoever comes with humble heart and face

it pardons, and it never tires of mercy,

whatever the offences that are his.

And if, against its nature, it endures

to be prayed often, it still mirrors Him,

ensuring that the sin may be more feared:

130 does he repent indeed

who goes from one sin to commit another?

So when my lady, whom swift pity moves,

looked down at me, and saw that I revealed

a punishment commensurate with my sin,

she kindly brought me back to my first state.

Yet nothing’s to be trusted in this world:

praying to her again, I felt my bones

and sinews turn to flint; nothing remains

now but a voice shaken from my poor frame

140 calling on Death, and calling out her name.

A wailing spirit (I recall) I wandered

through alien caverns in an empty land,

mourning so many years my unleashed ardour;

till finally that evil reached its end,

and I returned into my earthly members,

in order, it would seem, to suffer more.

I followed up so closely my desire

that one day, hunting, as my custom was,

I saw that creature – wild cruel beautiful –

150 stand naked in a pool,

the sunlight blazing strongly overhead.

Then I, because no other sight can please me,

stood staring at her, covered in her shame;

to get revenge, or just to hide herself,

she splashed my face with water from her hand.

This is the truth (however it may seem):

I sensed myself being very rapidly

transformed from what I really ought to be

into a stag roaming the woods, alone,

160 still running from a pack of hounds, my own.

Canzon, I never was that golden cloud

precipitating in a precious shower

which helped a little to exhaust Jove’s ardour;

yet I have been the flame that one look kindled,

the bird that rises highest in the air,

exalting her with every phrase I made:

nor could I leave, for any changing shape

I took, the laurel: its mere shade’s a joy

driving all lesser pleasures far away.

32 That cruel combatant: Love.

48 Peneus: on whose bank Daphne was changed into laurel.

a prouder river: the Sorgue, the Rhone, or the Durance.

51 white plumes: Cycnus, after the fall of his nephew Phaethon into the river Po, lamented so much that he was changed into a swan.

80 stone: Battus, after promising Mercury not to reveal a secret, did reveal it to Mercury himself who came in disguise, and for this Battus was turned into a stone.

86 my Lord: Love.

117 a fountain: Byblis, when her brother rejected her love, wept so much she was transformed into a fountain.

139 a voice: Echo, when her love was rejected by Narcissus, wasted away until she was nothing but a voice.

159 a stag: The hunter Actaeon, who chanced to see Diana bathing, was transformed by her into a stag and hunted and torn by his own hounds.

162 a precious shower: Jove descended in a shower of gold to consummate his love for Danae.

165 the bird: Jove assumed the form of an eagle in order to carry Ganymede off to Olympus.