Petrarch in English

by Thomas Roche (ed)

  Even through the middle of the nineteenth century there are merely sporadic attempts to do Petrarch anew. Interest in Petrarch was undoubtedly stirred by the revelations of the Abbé de Sade that Laura was a married woman and mother of numerous children, Memoires pour la vie François de Petrarque (1764–7). Reactions to this most shocking ‘fact’ were frequent because it all but deconstructed the myth of the unfulfilled and suffering poet. The ‘real’ Laura had been found: the Italians did not like it because she was French; other Europeans did not like it because it brought the poet they wanted to admire too close to the man he was, a brilliant intellectual in minor orders with two illegitimate children. It domesticated the whole sonnet sequence tradition and brought it much closer to the emerging world of the novel.

  In fact, the major tendency of Petrarchan criticism was to reify the love of Petrarch for Laura. It begins with the commentary of Vellutello (twenty-six editions), whose main aim is to historify the poems by identifying as many of them with the actual places and events he thought they represented, and thus the poems become merely a disguised biography, complete with a chronology and a map. Time and space invade the sonnet world to render it more accessible but merely reduce the impact of the fiction that Petrarch wrought. What happens when that desire, that love, that torment, that betrayal – loses the icy edge of the damnation threatened by late-medieval, Christian moral theology, vividly described by Petrarch in his other writings? Very soon we arrive at an aesthetic and sentimental rationale for the poetic fiction. We are but one step from the fantasies of Walter Mitty.

  The tradition of writing sonnet sequences foundered in England long before the mid seventeenth century. What had been sonnet sequences became miscellanies of the works of individual poets, such as William Habington’s Castara (1634) or Abraham Cowley’s The Mistresse (1647), in which topical and occasional poems still ride under the rubric of that presiding female figure who has lost all substance. Interest in the sonnet as a form waned, although there are important exceptions in the Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Turner Smith, which went through eleven editions, and the Fourteen Sonnets and Other Poems (1789) of William Lisle Bowles, which so excited the imagination of the young Coleridge, who remarks in the Biographia Literaria: ‘Bowles and Cowper were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thought with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.’ The Petrarchan sonnet would never be the same again. Its nature would become the nature of Wordsworth; its diction distorted by the Romantic ego, which has cast its shadow over the reading of Petrarch to the present day.

  Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sonnet writing owes much to the fact that the Romantics resuscitated the sonnet almost as the standard of their ‘newness’: every river, brook and nook could have its sonnet as an expression of the poet’s individuality. But this is a problem for the scholar of poetic diction, since most rivers, brooks and nooks do not contribute much to the individuality of any poet. If you have seen one, you have seen them all, unless you live there. Wordsworth’s River Duddon series and his more than five hundred other sonnets merely added to the stream.

  The appearance of George Henderson’s Petrarca: a Selection of Sonnets from Various Authors, with an Introductory Dissertation on the Origin and Structure of the Sonnet (1803) prepares us for the renewed interest in the historical Petrarch and the history of the englishing of Petrarch, shown in Henderson’s selection of translators from Surrey to Thomas Moore, but Petrarch’s continuing influence is known mainly through two large publishing ventures, the first, a five-volume anthology of sonnets from Italian, French, English, German, Greek and Hebrew, chosen by Capel Lofft in 1813–14, and the second, the first complete translation of Petrarch by English hands published by Henry Bohn in 1859 in his famous Illustrated Libraries (833 volumes in toto). At last the Canzoniere had made it in English.

  But let us start with Capel Lofft (1751–1824), the son of Christopher Lofft, secretary to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and Anne Capell, sister of the Edward Capell who edited Shakespeare. He was educated at Eton, Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Lincoln’s Inn, an incendiary Whig, reformer par excellence, whom Boswell called ‘this little David of popular spirit’ and whom Napoleon accounted ‘parmi [mes] amis les plus affectionés’, classical scholar, lover of literature, music, botany and astronomy. In 1813–14 he produced his five-volume Laura, or an Anthology of Sonnets (on the Petrarchan model) and Quatorzains, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German. It is an astonishing feat, and certainly his almost two-hundred page introduction on the nature and history of the sonnet is the most learned discourse we have today. His insights into the variations on the sonnet form should be mandatory reading for any creative writing course still interested in poetic form. It is the kind of book that could not be produced today. He ranges from the earliest examples of the sonnet in Italian to examples from his contemporaries: Bowles, Coleridge, Charlotte Turner Smith, his wife Sarah Watson Finch, and his own. Permission fees alone would militate against publication. He obviously read everything, knew everyone and was passionately concerned about the sonnet as a poetic form. His collection shows beyond any doubt that the sonnet as a form was very much alive in the early years of the nineteenth century. The four volumes of text contain 1000 sonnets, 250 to each volume, 300 of which are Italian sonnets, only 40 of which are by Petrarch, but the entire collection is called Laura, in tribute to the primary influence of Petrarch. From the small number of Petrarchan sonnets translated by a number of hands it might almost seem that there was a competition to show who would make the best English translation, but emulation of the Italian was not the main point since there are over 600 original English sonnets in the collection. Surprisingly, the most often reproduced early English sonneteer is Milton, whose Italian sonnets invited many translations. Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, Drayton come lagging far behind. No one dealing with the subject of the sonnet in the Romantic period should ignore this massive compendium, which puts Henderson’s Petrarca totally out of court.

  It was only a logical progression to go beyond Capel Lofft’s achievement of surveying the whole field of sonneteering for Bohn to produce the first complete translation of Petrarch in English by various hands. The presence in London in the early 1820s of Ugo Foscolo, the vagabond prince of Italian Romantic poets, and the publication of his Essays on Petrarch (1821, 1823), dedicated to Lady Dacre, could only have spurred interest. Thomas Campbell’s two-volume Life of Petrarch (1841) was reprinted several times and also appeared in a condensed form as the introduction to Bohn. The world was ready for Bohn’s popular venture, and it still should be read carefully by all interested in Petrarchan influence in England.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Yeats played through his Petrarchan romance with Maude Gonne and her daughter Isolde with no more success than Petrarch with Laura, but it is less well known that Synge turned to his prose versions of Petrarch after a similar failure of romantic success, the defeated playboy of the world of Italy. How much of Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott was playing through their endeavours? How much of Lancelot and Elaine? When does the adjective ‘tender’ become an operative word in translations of Petrarch? These early twentieth-century Petrarchans are filled with a spirituality about their love that would have horrified Petrarch.

  Translations in the latter part of the twentieth century are, with a few notable exceptions, the work of professional Italianist academics. Gone are the dilettante nobility and the literate clergy. The Italian text is presented with the translation on facing pages. In this century the earliest translation of the entire Canzoniere was the work of Anna Maria Armi, whose attempt to maintain the rhyme scheme of the original introduces many inaccuracies, but for whom I still have a personal attachment since it was my introduction to the Canzoniere, at a time when the Italian by itself would have proved too inaccessible. In 1976 the appearance of Robert Durling’s prose versions provided a learned and necessar
y step in helping those of us in English literary studies with a more accurate aid to the mastery of Petrarch’s poetry. Most recently, the editions of James Wyatt Cook and Germaine Warkentin (1995) and Mark Musa (1996) have appeared with all the apparatus of scholarly editions. None of the four saw fit to include the Trionfi as part of their mighty labours, an observation that I hope will seem less churlish than it might appear at first; I mean only to point to a desideratum to make English Petrarch more complete.

  Notes

  1. The others are Charles Bagot Cayley, The Sonnets and Stanzas of Petrarch, translated by C. B. Cayley (1879), Anna Maria Armi, Petrarch: Sonnets and Songs (1946), Robert Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (1976), James Wyatt Cook, Petrarch’s Songbook (1995) and Mark Musa, Petrarch: The Canzoniere, or, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (1996). In addition to which we now have Anthony Mortimer’s lavish selection in the Penguin Classics series, Petrarch’s Canzoniere: Selected Poems (2002).

  2. There were only two poetic coronations before Petrarch. Albertino Mussato was crowned in his native city of Padua on 3 December 1315. Dante was crowned posthumously in September 1321 at his funeral, as was Convenevole da Prato, Petrarch’s teacher, at his funeral. See Ernest Hatch Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’ and Other Petrarchan Studies (1951), pp. 21–4, and J. B. Trapp, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958), pp. 227–55.

  3. The sonnets are P140 (Tottel 2), P145 (Tottel 12), P164 (Tottel 10) and P310 (Tottel 2); the ballata is P11 (Tottel 13).

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  It is the purpose of this anthology of English translations of Petrarch to make available a wide range of his vernacular output and to show how deeply embedded Petrarch is in the English tradition of poetry from Chaucer to the present day. If to no other purpose it will add body to that emaciated and much misunderstood adjective ‘Petrarchan’.

  I begin with the Trionfi, which all but sank from poetic sight in the twentieth century, and offer translations by three amateur poets of the sixteenth century, Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Queen Elizabeth, one by the Countess of Pembroke, and one Scot of the mid-seventeenth century, Anna Hume. I also include the fragment of Lady Dacre’s Triumph of Death and the entire Triumph of Eternity by the Reverend Henry Boyd to complete the fragment by Queen Elizabeth. I then present the most popular Petrarchan poems, as witnessed by the number of times they have been translated over the centuries, beginning with Chaucer who was the first Englishman to translate Petrarch. Thereafter the chronology is that of the English translation rather than the position of the poem in the Canzoniere for the simple reason that (as I hope will be apparent) certain themes and poetic topoi appeal to each succeeding generation of English poets.

  I have tried to give a broad spectrum of translators of Petrarch into English to show his enormous influence on the language of English poetry and I conclude with a Coda: Parodies and Replays that attempts to show how Petrarchan we still are.

  I have tried for every selection to use the earliest printed text and to maintain the typography, spelling and punctuation of that edition. Hence for the earlier writers, especially, I retain the i for j, and u for ν of the original orthography but substitute modern s for the long s (f) and modernize the old form vv to our w. Punctuation is retained even when modern punctuation demands a comma or a full stop; dashes have been made consistent and single quotation marks are used throughout.

  Information about the source of each selection is given in the headnote to each author or in the Acknowledgements. George Watson’s The English Petrarchans: A Critical Bibliography of the Canzoniere (1966) is used as a frequent reference in the headnotes (abbreviated as ‘Watson, English Petrarchans’). Above most of the poems is a letter Ρ followed by a number – the number of the Petrarchan original – and the first line of that poem. If there is no P-notation, the poem is an original poem of that author, so remarkably Petrarchan that I could not exclude it. At the end of the volume is an appendix of all the selected translations in the order of Petrarch’s original.

  TRIONFI

  PREFACE

  The Trionfi are the intellectual grammar of Petrarch’s Canzoniere; they present the framework within which we should read the passionate declaration of his love for Laura in those sonnets, canzoni, ballate, sestine and madrigali in which the unremitting voice of the poet-lover hovers between hope of finding his love and fear of losing her. They teach us how to read the torrent of his outpourings, as violent as the torrent of Vaucluse, in Provence, at whose base he wrote many of the poems. They teach us that the secret of grasping and understanding the contradictions and non sequiturs of the lyrics lies in the intellectual world most apparent to Petrarch, the double world of classical literature and Christian moral thought, that skillfully intermeddled, inter-texted world which was the intellectual gift to Petrarch from the preceding two thousand years.

  The ground of his Trionfi is his covert contest with Dante, for the Trionfi are written in the terza rima of Dante’s Commedia. The substantive subject of these poems is the Roman triumphus, that paean to victory in battle which the Romans perfected as they conquered the world, the welcome home to the conquering hero. But Petrarch’s Trionfi as we read them bear less resemblance to Roman triumphi than they do to the literary adaptations beginning with Ovid’s Amores I. 2, in which Amor makes his triumph over the poet-lover. Petrarch also had in mind Dante’s Purgatorio 29 and Boccaccio’s L’amorosa visione, by which the Roman triumphus and Ovid himself are translated into the Christian moral vision of the Middle Ages, in which Love does triumph but only as the Christian God Who is Love. Petrarch’s triumphs take on an unmistakable Christian determination in that we move from triumphs possible for Romans – Love, Death, Fame and Time – to a victory that no Roman could have foreseen – Eternity, which resoundingly cancels the Roman triumph against the triumph of eternal life, promised only to the believing Christian. Petrarch’s particular innovation in this tradition is the Triumph of Chastity, a triumph not significant in Roman literature but inescapable in sonnet literature, for if the lady should succumb to the blandishments of the poet-lover, the whole poetic enterprise would collapse, as Byron saw with perfect clarity:

  Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

  He would have written sonnets all his life?

  Don Juan, III.8

  The Trionfi are deceptive poems if one does not understand their grammar, because there is, in fact, only one triumphal procession described by Petrarch – the triumph of Love, which has a cart and a triumphator and the attendant-conquered victims. All the rest are singularly lacking in depicting the pictorial qualities of a procession, in spite of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century illustrators, who drew triumphal chariots and victors that Petrarch does not describe. The narrator is constantly in control of the images he presents to the reader, and the narrative is essentially the same as that of the Canzoniere: Petrarch’s love for Laura, her indifference to his love, her death, his laureation because of his continued poetic devotion, and the rest is history.

  The appeal of the Trionfi during the sixteenth century is attested to by the fact that the Queen of England and the leading literary lady of the realm both tried their hands at turning Petrarch into English, Elizabeth by translating the first 88 lines of the Triumph of Eternity and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, by translating all of the Triumph of Death. One may understand why neither continued on in this pursuit because they tried to retain the terza rima of the original, a linguistic chore that can be appreciated only by those Anglophone writers who have attempted to translate all of Dante in his meter.

  There were two complete translations in the sixteenth century. The first by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, appeared in 1554; there is an excellent edition edited by D. D. Carnicelli (1971). The second translation is that of William Fowler (fl. 1603), tutor to the young James VI, and uncle to William Drummond of Hawthornden, among whose papers two versions of the manuscript exist in Edinburgh; published v
ersions are printed in the sixth volume, new series, of the Scottish Text Society, edited by Henry W. Meikle (1914). Both men resorted to the couplet as their form, and the first line of Fowler’s Triumph of Love will give the reader some indication why none of Fowler is reproduced here: ‘That tyme that did my sobbing sobbs and sorye sighes renewe…’, although much of the translation reads better than Morley.

  The last of the Renaissance translators is Anna Hume, the daughter of David Hume of Godscroft, who may or may not have seen her father’s History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus through the press, but who most certainly translated the first three of the triumphs, which appeared in 1644. She too chose the couplet as her form, and her English is more comfortable to modern ears. To round out Elizabeth I’s translation I print that of the Reverend Henry Boyd, who was the first English speaker to translate the Divina commedia (1802). In 1807 he brought out his Triumphs of Petrarch.

  With the exception of the Countess of Pembroke none of these translators is a poet, but I felt that it was more important to have a text of the Trionfi included in this volume to give a context for the outpouring of sonnets that follow. I am encouraged in this decision by the fact that almost all Renaissance editions of Petrarch contain both Trionfi and Canzoniere. They must, or should, be read together.

  The Triumph of Love

  ANNA HUME (fl. 1644)

  Little is known of Anna Hume except as the translator of the first three of Petrarch’s Trionfi (1644) and also as the daughter of David Hume of Godscroft (b. 1573), whose History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus she edited in one of its troubled versions. She was known by William Drummond of Hawthornden, who mentions her troubles in publishing the History in one of his letters. She dedicated her translation to Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–80), who was the daughter of Frederick V, the Elector Palatine (elected King of Bohemia by the Protestant Union in 1619), and Elizabeth Stuart, the eldest daughter of James I and Anne of Denmark. This learned lady had a voluminous correspondence with Descartes, and in later life became the abbess of the Protestant nunnery at Hertford in Westphalia. Copy-text for both Hume’s Triumphs: Harvard University Library Ital 7122.9*