PENGUIN POETS IN TRANSLATION
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS
PETRARCH IN ENGLISH
FRANCESCO PETRARCA (PETRARCH), the son of an exiled Florentine notary, was born in 1304 in Arezzo. In 1312 he went with his father to Avignon, then the seat of the papal court, and in nearby Carpentras began a traditional training in rhetoric. After further education in law at Montpellier and Bologna, he was recalled by his father’s death to Avignon. There, on 6 April 1327, he first saw Laura who inspired the passion commemorated in the Canzoniere, the poetic sequence that future generations throughout Europe were to revere as the great model for love poetry. After some years in the service of Cardinal Colonna, a powerful and enlightened patron, and after travel in France, Germany and Flanders, Petrarch withdrew to Vaucluse (Provence) where he began the Latin epic Africa and the Triumphs. The fame of his learning and poetry grew rapidly and in 1341, on Easter Sunday, he was crowned poet laureate at the Capitol in Rome. In 1353, after the deaths of Laura and Cardinal Colonna, Petrarch left Avignon in disgust at the corruption of the papal court. Welcomed by the Visconti in Milan, he performed a number of diplomatic missions in Europe before moving on to Venice and finally to Padua. In his last years he completed the Triumphs and reordered and revised the poems of the Canzoniere. He died in July 1374.
THOMAS P. ROCHE, JR., Professor of English at Princeton University, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1931. He was educated at Yale, Cambridge and Princeton where he became Murray Professor of English Literature, Emeritus in 2002. He is the author of The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of the Faerie Queene (1964) and Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (1989). He has edited the essays of Rosemond Tuve and D. W. Robertson and is co-editor with William Oram and Anne Lake Prescott of Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual. He has also published on Sidney, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso. He is currently at work on the iconography of the muses from Hesiod to Milton.
PETRARCH IN ENGLISH
Edited by THOMAS P. ROCHE, JR.
PENGUIN BOOKS
To Cleopatra, Julie and Valentina – and Bo, without whose help this volume might have taken even longer.
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First published 2005
1
Editorial material and selection copyright © Thomas P. Roche, Jr., 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on pp. 311–12 constitute an extension of this copyright page
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193672-7
CONTENTS
Introduction
Editor’s Note
TRIONFI
Preface
The Triumph of Love
ANNA HUME
The Triumph of Chastity
ANNA HUME
The Triumph of Death
MARY SIDNEY HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE
The Triumph of Death
BARBARINA OGLE BRAND, LADY DACRE
The Triumph of Fame
HENRY PARKER, LORD MORLEY
The Triumph of Time
HENRY PARKER, LORD MORLEY
The Triumph of Eternity
ELIZABETH I
The Trimph of Eternity
REVEREND HENRY BOYD
CANZONIERE
Fourteenth Century
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Sixteenth Century
The Tomb Sonnet
RICHARD TOTTEL, Tottel’s Miscellany
HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
SIR THOMAS WYATT (including poems from the Egerton MS)
ANONYMOUS
EDMUND SPENSER
SIR WALTER RALEGH
RICHARD EDWARDS, The Paradise of Dainty Devices
EDWARD DE VERE, EARL OF OXFORD
THOMAS WATSON
CLEMENT ROBINSON, A Handful of Pleasant Delights
HENRY CONSTABLE
SAMUEL DANIEL
THOMAS LODGE
The Phoenix Nest
WILLIAM SMITH
ROBERT TOFTE
Seventeenth Century
England’s Helicon
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER, EARL OF STIRLING
WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN
THOMAS CAREW
WILLIAM HABINGTON
JOHN MILTON
WILLIAM CART WRIGHT
THOMAS STANLEY
JOHN DRYDEN
PHILIP AYRES
BASIL KENNET
Eighteenth Century
JAMES CAULFEILD, EARL OF CHARLEMONT
JOHN LANGHORNE
REVEREND WILLIAM COLLIER
SIR BROOKE BOOTHBY
SIR WILLIAM JONES
ALEXANDER FRASER TYTLER, LORD WOODHOUSELEE
CHARLOTTE TURNER SMITH
CAPEL LOFFT
JOHN NOTT
MARY ROBINSON
JOHN PENN
SIR SAMUEL EGERTON BRYDGES
ARCHDEACON FRANCIS WRANGHAM
Nineteenth Century
BARBARINA OGLE BRAND, LADY DACRE
THOMAS CAMPBELL
SUSAN WOLLASTON
MAJOR ROBERT GUTHRIE MACGREGOR
Bohn’s Illustrated Library
LEIGH HUNT
FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
CHARLES BAGOT CAYLEY
RICHARD GARNETT
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
Twentieth Century
AGNES TOBIN
JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
HELEN LEE PEABODY
MORRIS BISHOP
JOSEPH AUSLANDER
THOMAS G. BERGIN
GRAHAM HOUGH
JAMES WYATT COOK
MARK MUSA
ANTHONY MORTIMER
NICHOLAS KILMER
MARION SHORE
Coda: Parodies and Replays including work by GIACOMO DA LENTINO, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, BARNABE BARNES, LORD BYRON, EZRA POUND, JILL MCDONOUGH, MARCIA KARP AND GEOFFREY HILL
Petrarchan Order of the Selected Translations
Acknowledgements
Index of Titles and First Lines
Index of Authors/Translators
INTRODUCTION
In a century where Dante seems to reign supreme, it is time
to recognize the simple fact that Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) was the most important Italian poet for three centuries following his death. No lyric poet in Europe escaped his influence. On the other hand, it must be admitted that more than fifty complete translations of The Divine Comedy have appeared since the first translation by the Reverend Henry Boyd in 1802, and this cannot be said of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the Latin title for his Canzoniere, or Rime sparse, which have been translated only six times in their entirety, the first being the leisure avocation of Captain Robert Guthrie Macgregor while on military service in India (Odes of Petrarch, 1851, and Indian Leisure, 1854).1
The paucity of complete translations of Petrarch argues not so much a lack of interest in the poetry as the extraordinary difficulty of translating lyrics of such opacity; they seem almost impervious to translation, just like Dante’s lyrics. The Divine Comedy has a narrative that eases the translator over the really tough linguistic problems, but a lyric has no narrative, no set of stable characters, no immediately apprehensible narrator. In reading or translating lyrics we are intruders on an overheard conversation or monologue, of which we try to make sense, in order to become part of the conversation, and for this reason translators are fond of appending descriptive titles such as ‘On receiving a pair of his lady’s gloves’ or ‘On seeing his lady bathing’, which more often than not impose a more fleshly/physical mise-en-scène than was intended by the author or delivered by the poem.
Because of these anomalies of the lyric mode, translators are much more apt to seize on a single poem or a group of poems and to feel no compulsion to complete the entire lyric sequence. Such is the case with Petrarch, who has attracted more gifted amateurs since the Renaissance than any other poet (with the possible exception of Horace) to try their skill at getting a Petrarch sonnet or canzone into English. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such translation was made not only to show the translator’s skill but also to show that English was as powerful a linguistic medium as Italian. Once English had established its own literary tradition, the translation was to show the poetic superiority of the poet or poetaster. Needless to say, the latter group was dominant.
The aim of this volume, Petrarch in English, is accurately summarized by its immediate predecessor, Bohn’s Illustrated Library, which produced its complete Petrarch by various hands, in London, 1859. The Preface to that volume contains a paragraph that is no less true today:
It is rather a singular fact that, while the other three Poets of this world-famed series – Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso – have each found several translators, no complete version of the fourth [Petrarch], and in Italy the most popular, has hitherto been presented to the English reader. This lacune becomes the more remarkable when we consider the great influence which Petrarch has undoubtedly exercised on our poetry from the time of Chaucer downwards.
Bohn’s collection of Petrarch in translation – and mine – deal only with his poems in the vernacular, although he wrote in Latin an unfinished epic poem, Africa, as well as treatises that were to influence the intellectual history of Europe, and thousands of pages of prose letters to friends, to classical authors, which were also to become important documents in European intellectual history. Petrarch saw his audience as the past, the present, and the future. He was certainly the most important intellectual in fourteenth-century Italy, and the least important of his works for his own century, the Canzoniere, and the Trionfi, his vernacular poems, have become for the most part the only fragment of his almost universal fame to endure in the twentieth-first century. His curse is that his story is known, but his poems are not.
His relationship to Dante is substantial, although Petrarch in a letter to Boccaccio is loath to answer Boccaccio’s question of why he never mentions Dante. The letter is a work of superb skill, in which Petrarch manages to praise Dante and his works better than any contemporary writer – without even mentioning Dante’s name. That his older contemporary Dante (1265–1321) influenced Petrarch’s writing in the vernacular is without question. Dante’s La divina commedia, from its first appearance, became the Italian rival to Virgil’s Aeneid, and Petrarch acceded to this just fame by writing his Africa in Latin, an attempt to rival Virgil in his own language. His rivalry with Dante took the form of writing his Trionfi in the same terza rima verse form (aba bcb cdc) as the Commedia. These six poems use Dante’s meter to contract the exquisite vision of Dante to a paradigm based solely on Petrarch’s putative love of Laura, itself an imitation of Dante’s love for Beatrice. The six poems carry Petrarch’s love of Laura through the Triumph of Love (6 April 1327, Petrarch’s first sight of Laura), to the Triumph of Chastity (Laura’s refusal of his love), to the Triumph of Death (6 April 1348, the death of Laura), to the Triumph of Fame (his celebration of her), to the Triumph of Time (the obliteration of earthly memory), to the Triumph of Eternity (the turn from earthly things to God). The poems are a sonnet sequence of love and value within the framework of fourteenth-century Christianity and were meant to do what Dante had done in epic form, which Petrarch knew he could not, or would not, rival. The Trionfi, in fact, had more printed editions than Dante’s Commedia in the following two centuries.
His second work in the vernacular shows Petrarch again rivalling Dante, whose first poetic work was La vita nuova, the story of the inception and growth of his love for Beatrice, written in the form of sonnets and canzoni held together in a prose framework that ultimately was an imitation of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius. Here Petrarch felt he had a chance to surpass Dante. He wrote 366 poems, mostly sonnets, interspersed with ballate, sestine, madrigali and canzoni, that were to become the model of love poetry ever afterward.
The Canzoniere is a sad story of a young poet smitten with love for a married woman who does not return his love, and who dies, but the poet continues in his torment for the rest of his life. It is the paradigm for human love that continues until Edgar Allen Poe’s classic statement that there is nothing more poetical than the death of a beautiful woman. The story is an unjustifiable ethic, almost Thurberian in its tenacity, and depends on the death of the woman, and it is the beginning of the sonnet sequence tradition, that virus of European poetry that has hounded love poetry to the present day.
The story is simply recorded on the flyleaf of Petrarch’s copy of Virgil, now in the Ambrosiana Library, Milan. This should be read in its entirety for its poignancy and intellectual rigor.
Laurea, illustrious for her own virtues and long celebrated in my poems, first appeared to my eyes about the time of my early manhood in the year of the Lord 1327 on the sixth day of the month of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon in the morning; and in the same city, in the same month of April, on the same sixth day, at the same first hour, in the year 1348, her light was withdrawn from this light when I by chance was then at Verona, unaware of my fate. Moreover, the unhappy news reached me through a letter of Ludovico in the same year, in the month of May, the nineteenth day early. That most chaste and most beautiful body was placed in the church of the Franciscans on the very day of her death at vespers. But her soul has, I am persuaded, returned to the heaven whence it came, as Seneca says of Scipio Africanus. As a memorial, afflicting yet mixed with a certain bitter sweetness, I have decided to make this record in this place of all places, which often falls under my eyes, that I may reflect that there can be no more pleasure for me in this life, and that, now that the chief bond is broken, I may be warned by frequently looking at these words and by the thought of the flying years that it is time to flee from Babylon. This, by God’s Grace will be easy for me, when I think courageously and manfully of the past’s vain concerns and empty hopes and unexpected outcomes.
Even after her death he struggled with his passion until he himself died on 19 July 1374, the day before his seventieth birthday.
The Canzoniere is the record of this extraordinary infatuation, and it is even more extraordinary in that we do not know if Laura existed. We know from an Abbé de Sade
, an eighteenth-century ancestor of the Marquis de Sade, that a Laure de Noves was married to a Hugues de Sade on 16 January 1325 and that this same Laura made a will on 3 April 1348, when the Black Plague was ravaging Europe. The speed with which she was buried on that sixth of April does suggest that she was a victim of the Plague. We know also that she bore Hugues de Sade eleven children (although Thomas Campbell claims there were merely ten). Unfortunately the documents cited by the Abbé were destroyed during the French Revolution, and we cannot be certain that the Abbé was not creating a French muse for the famous Italian poet. The Abbé was not the first to make a connection between this woman and Petrarch’s Laura. Vellutello’s commentary (1525 and thereafter) suggests a slightly different time and place for their first meeting in 1327. Also the French poet Maurice Scève, while studying law in Avignon, discovered the tomb almost two hundred years later and found there a metal box, inside which was a medal depicting a woman ripping out her heart and a sonnet ‘Qui reposan quei caste & felice ossa’, apparently by Petrarch (see Giovanni di Tournes, ‘The Tomb Sonnet’).
The Canzoniere, beginning with sonnet 4’s acronym of Lau-Re-Ta (see Basil Kennet), are modelled on another Laura, as described in Ovid’s myth of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne in Book I of the Metamorphoses. It is an Apollo, fresh from his victory over the serpent Python, celebrated ever after by the Pythian games, in which the victor was crowned with oak leaves because the Laurel was not yet [laurus nondum est], and then Ovid swings into his story of Apollo and Daphne, whose metamorphosis into the laurel defeated Apollo’s desires and provided him with the leaves to crown himself as god of poetry. In short, love thwarted crowns itself with the spoils of its poetic talents. Ovid concludes his story of Apollo and Daphne by linking the myth to the custom of crowning both Caesars and poets with laurel on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.
That Petrarch knew this myth intimately cannot be doubted because he weaves it into the fabric of his life. He tells us in a letter that on the first day of September 1340, in the morning he received an invitation from the Roman Senate to be crowned laureate, and on the afternoon of that very same day a similar invitation from the University of Paris. Although we may be surprised that Italian mail service in the fourteenth century seems infinitely superior to that of the twenty-first century, we should be even more surprised that either the Roman Senate or the University of Paris should have issued such an invitation since neither body had a custom of laureation before Petrarch tells us of their invitation to him. On advice from friends (and no doubt from his own preference) he chose the invitation of the Roman Senate and asked for the sponsorship of King Robert of Naples, for which purpose he travelled to Naples, reaching there sometime in February 1341. Petrarch was duly examined by King Robert as to his eligibility for the honour of laureation and satisfied the requirement. King Robert, because of his age, wanted the ceremony to be performed in Naples, but Petrarch requested that his coronation take place in the Senatorial Palace on the Capitoline in Rome. The request was granted, and armed with a ‘robe of honour’ from the king, Petrarch set out for Rome, arriving there most probably on Good Friday, 6 April 1341. On Easter Sunday Petrarch gave his Coronation Oration on the virtues of the Laurel, received the triple crown of poeta laureatus from the hands of his friend, Roman Senator, Orso dell’Anguillara, and after the ceremony proceeded to old St Peter’s where he placed his crown on the high altar. Petrarch would no doubt have seen that his coronation was quite literally the fulfilment of Apollo’s prophecy about the laurel, for not since antiquity had a poet been crowned in Rome, if indeed any such ceremonies ever took place, and only three other laureations had occurred anywhere. We can only suppose that Petrarch invented the occasion and orchestrated its execution.2
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