The Poetry of Petrarch

by David Young

  It should not surprise us that this two-part asymmetric form is also the basic structure of the sonnet, with its eight-line complication, its shift or volta, and its six-line resolution. Thus the shape of a life, the shape of a sequence, and the shape of a form that makes up the predominant means of composing it are all in accord with one another. Petrarch writes in other forms, of course, including the sestina, the canzone, the madrigal, and the ballata. But the sonnet is what sustains him, and he records his feelings and experiences in it faithfully, sometimes in groups, sometimes in individual poems.9

  Not every poem in the sequence is about Laura; there are political tirades, tributes to other friends, laments for deaths and other losses, advice to those who may or may not ignore it, tributes to nature, meditations on history and mythology, accounts of dreams, occasional poems written to accompany gifts, invitations, apologies for declining invitations, and many other subjects. Always, though, Laura is at the center, an emotional polestar, a source of both stability and torment, love and anger.

  We know that Petrarch led a busy life, with much travel and many relationships (including the fathering of two illegitimate children). In the sequence, however, the central drama to which the poems return again and again involves a kind of triangle: there is Petrarch, there is Laura, and there is the love god, Cupid or Eros or just plain Love, who rules Petrarch’s heart and enslaves him to his love for Laura. Cupid might be thought of as the personified equivalent of some of our modern ideas about biological imperatives and sex drives. He undermines self-control, and he blinds us to larger realities by dominating our senses. A pagan presence in a Christian poem, he is a powerful contradiction to the way that the Church says the world is supposed to work.

  The love god’s presence also helps focus the lover’s anger. By blaming Love and his abusive tyranny, Petrarch can deflect the anger he feels toward Laura and overcome his temptation to resent the fact of her physical beauty. She is the subject of his obsession, but she is not to blame. Cupid is, and Petrarch in turn, for being defeated by him. It is a curious combination of metamorphosis and steadiness; a changeable reality is what gives Cupid his dominance over fickle human beings. But the dominance, in Petrarch’s case at least, leads not to fickleness but to fidelity, an unwavering love for Laura and Laura alone. That is the trick the poet plays on the god of love. Eventually, through death and redefinition, his love and fidelity reward him, training the tormented poet to an understanding of heavenly love and heavenly beauty, values which Laura is able to represent fully only after she has left the earth.

  The result echoes St. Augustine, but it also invokes poets such as Ovid and Horace, whom Petrarch admired, and it tells a story that seems at times to outdistance in complexity and peculiarity the theology that quite naturally underpins it. Petrarch faces the modern world, but he also faces the medieval world and, beyond it, the classical world. That comprehensiveness accounts in great part for his mastery. Adolfo Bartoli, writing in 1884, put it very well:

  This descent into his own spirit, with its seizing of its griefs and joys, its making of a fleeting moment an immortal poem; this self-scrutiny, turning every impulse into art; this abandonment of medieval symbolism and transcendental idealism; this seeing of humanity plain, feeling it in all its truth—this is what makes Petrarch the first lyric poet of the new time, the heir of antiquity and the herald of the great art of the modern world.10

  * * *

  Translating is a most peculiar activity. On the one hand it seems inevitably doomed both to inadequacy and to incompleteness. On the other hand it offers a kind of loaves-and-fishes legerdemain: where one poem existed, two now stand, related but different, alike but occupying different linguistic territories and, in some cases, different ages and eras. Is a translated poem the evil twin of the original, or is it a miraculous clone, a musical transposition whereby one valuable thing is replicated, its value effectively doubled? A lifetime of translating—Rilke, Holub, Tu Fu, Neruda, Yu Xuanji—has never completely resolved this question for me. If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on. Barring that, however, this imperfect art is one we at least need to tolerate, perhaps even welcome. And poets, I would argue, are the best equipped to succeed as translators of poetry. Just as you would turn to a composer to get effective musical transposition, you need a poet to wrestle a poem from one language into another, the latter being the one in which he or she has some skill at making poems.

  Personally, I translate poems for the same reason that I seek out and read translations: to develop acquaintance with poets and poetry I might not otherwise be able to know. In the case of Petrarch, I began producing versions of his sonnets to share with my students who were trying to understand the tradition in which Shakespeare worked. I wanted something that would feel contemporary to them, written in a living language they would recognize as poetry, and something that would also retain the flavor and distinctiveness of the past. A difficult prescription, surely, but a worthwhile negotiation involving two languages, two times, two sets of possibilities.

  My solution was to retain the part of Petrarch’s formality that was manageable—a regularity of meter that would also recall Shakespeare’s example—without attempting to replicate the difficult rhyme schemes. Italian rhymes much more readily than English, and searching for ways to make a rhyme scheme function can do serious injury to syntax, imagery, tone, and sense. Rhymes do occur throughout my versions, but they are internal rhymes, incidental rhymes, consonantal rhymes, and so forth, free from the demands of strict pattern but part, nevertheless, of an overall musicality.

  Meter, while very demanding in its own right, allows for considerable flexibility of expression. Its challenge would keep me alert, I hoped, sensitive to Petrarch’s climate and aesthetic, without cutting off access to my own language and my own world, my sense of how to make literary style into a living presence, a voice on the page, speaking authentically to listeners and readers of the same time and place. (The sestinas are the one exception to my consistent commitment to iambics.)

  All in all, I have tried to stay close to Petrarch’s diction, syntax, and tone, not wishing to impose my own sensibility or vocabulary on what was so well thought out and so remarkably consistent in the first place. My “liberties,” where they occur, come from the constraints of meter and the desire to be clear and straightforward. Perhaps it will be useful to illustrate my method with one of Petrarch’s better-known sonnets. Here is the Italian of Number 189:

  Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio

  per aspro mare a mezza notte il verno

  enfra Scilla et Caribdi, et al governo

  siede ’l signore anzi ’l nimico mio;

  à ciascun remo un penser pronto et rio

  che la tempesta e ’l fin par ch’ abbi a scherno;

  la vela rompe un vento umido eterno

  di sospir, di speranze et di desio;

  pioggia di lagrimar, nebbia di sdegni

  bagna et rallenta le già stanche sarte

  che son d’error con ignoranzia attorto.

  Celansi i duo mei dolci usati segni,

  morta fra l’onde è la ragion et l’arte

  tal ch’ I’ ’ncomincio a desperar del porto.

  An English prose version of this by Robert Durling reads as follows:

  My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight, in winter, between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the tiller sits my lord, rather my enemy;

  each oar is manned by a ready, cruel thought that seems to scorn the tempest and the end; a wet, changeless wind of sighs, hopes, and desires breaks the sail;

  a rain of weeping, a mist of disdain wet and loosen the already weary ropes, made of error twisted up with ignorance.

  My two usual sweet stars are hidden; dead among the waves are reason and skill; so that I begin to despair of the
port. (Durling, 334)

  Durling’s version reconfigures some of the syntax, changing, for example, what is literally “the sail is burst by a wet, eternal wind of sighs, hopes, and desires” into something that is more comfortable in terms of English word order, but it is otherwise extremely faithful.

  As it happens, we have a wonderful translation of this sonnet by the sixteenth-century English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt:

  My galy charged with forgetfulness

  Thorrough sharpe sees in wynter nyghets doeth pas

  Twene Rock and Rock; and eke myn enemy, Alas,

  That is my lord, sterith with cruelness;

  And every owre a thought in rediness,

  As tho that deth were light in such a case.

  An endles wiynd doeth tere the sayll a pase

  Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes.

  A rain of teris, a clowde of derk disdain

  Hath done the wered cordes great hinderaunce,

  Wrethed with errour and eke with ignoraunce.

  The starres be hid that led me to this pain,

  Drowned is reason that should me confort,

  And I remain dispering of the port.

  Wyatt has to leave a few things out, and his first two rhymes may charge his galley with an excess of sibilance, but his language is pungent and direct, a strong response to Petrarch’s Italian. Had he done the whole sequence, instead of just a few of the sonnets, I might not have felt the need to undertake this project!

  Next, for comparison, is a rhymed version by Thomas Bergin, done in the twentieth century but not untypical of the nineteenth-century fashion for translating Petrarch:

  Charged with oblivion my ship careers

  Through stormy combers in the depth of night;

  Left lies Charybdis, Scylla to the right;

  My master—nay my foe sits aft and steers.

  Wild fancies ply the oars, mad mutineers,

  Reckless of journey’s end or tempest’s might;

  The canvas splits ’gainst the relentless spite

  Of blasts of hopes and sighs and anxious fears.

  A rain of tears, a blinding mist of wrath

  Drench and undo the cordage, long since worn

  And fouled in knots of ignorance and error;

  The two sweet lights are lost that showed my path,

  Reason and art lie ’neath the waves forlorn:

  “What hope of harbor now?” I cry in terror.

  (Bergin, 334)

  This is quite skillful, though I feel that the attachment to traditional English poetic diction, including contractions such as ’gainst and ’neath, as well as phrases like “wild fancies” and “waves forlorn,” makes Petrarch sound too much like a perfunctory late Romantic. Key details, such as the facts of midnight and winter, get blurred when presented merely as “the depth of night.” Preserving the rhyme scheme is an honorable challenge, but it’s worth asking whether the matching of wrath and path, worn and forlorn, and error and terror really does that much to enhance the poem. At the same time, it’s impossible not to admire the difficult commitment to rhyme and meter that Bergin manages to sustain here.

  Here is my own version, which has benefited, among other things, from Wyatt’s choice of galley for the vessel of the opening line:

  My galley, loaded with forgetfulness,

  rolls through rough seas, at midnight, during winter,

  aiming between Charybdis and sharp Scylla;

  my lord, ah no, my foe, sits at the tiller;

  each oar is wielded by a quick, mad thought

  that seems to scorn the storm and what it means;

  an endless wind of moisture, of deep sighs,

  of hopes and passions, rips the sail in half;

  tears in a steady downpour, mists of hate,

  are loosening and soaking all the ropes,

  ropes made of ignorance, tangled up with error.

  The two sweet stars I steer by are obscured;

  reason and skill are dead amid the waves;

  and I don’t think I’ll ever see the port.

  My hope is that this captures the drama and energy of the original without either modernizing it excessively or leaving it sounding or feeling too archaic. It is a poet’s, rather than a scholar’s, version—I have found a nice off rhyme in Scylla and tiller, and I like the contrasting music of, for example, lines 5 and 6—but I have tried to hew very closely to the exact sense of the Italian text.

  Readers will judge my success or failure for themselves, but I wish to acknowledge here the value that other translators have brought to my enterprise. Foremost is the aforementioned Robert K. Durling, whose Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, with facing-page English prose and Italian originals, was invaluable to me. Again and again I strayed from the sensible diction and shrewd syntax of Durling’s versions in search of alternatives, only to return eventually to his model and his vision. I have wanted to have poetry where he was content with prose, but little else separates us. His Petrarch is my Petrarch—the man, the writer, the reader, the technician, the jokester—and I am considerably in his debt. Even my explanatory notes tend to echo his, and they largely adopt his format. Why quarrel with success?

  Two other recent scholarly translators have treated Petrarch in much the same way I do, faithful to meter but dispensing with rhyme scheme. I encountered James Wyatt Cook’s version early on, and kept it at hand, sometimes to quarrel with its choices, sometimes to admire them. Mark Musa’s version came to my notice when I was well along in the project, and thereafter I found it quite useful as well. I was interested in the notes and perspectives of these translators, as well as in their solutions to problems of diction and syntax.

  I also found, late in the process, a translator who had tried doing a selection from Petrarch in contemporary free verse, Nicholas Kilmer, and another one who has recently attempted to do the entire sequence using off rhymes, J. G. Nichols. While disagreeing with their solutions, I found their efforts instructive. One other book was at hand as I worked, a limited edition of Petrarch sonnets put together by Thomas G. Bergin; this selection assembles formal versions from several centuries, including the version of Number 189 quoted earlier. These examples helped persuade me of the folly of trying to rhyme; they tend to make Petrarch sound like a second-rate Elizabethan poet crossed with a third-rate Victorian. But some surprisingly graceful efforts turned up as well, particularly those of Morris Bishop, who also wrote a charming biography that I found helpful as background reading.

  After some pondering, I decided that this need not be a bilingual edition, a choice that makes for a mercifully smaller book. The decision was based partly on the ready availability of the Durling, Cook, and Musa versions, all with facing-page Italian, and partly on the fact that Petrarch’s text is now easily available on the Internet, in Seth Jerchower’s “Petrarchan Grotto,” which can be found at http://petrarch.freeservers.com. It is essentially the same text as Cook’s and also quite close to those of Durling and Musa.

  Oberlin College’s Petrarch connection is of particular interest to me. The greatest Petrarch scholar of the twentieth century, Ernest Hatch Wilkins, happened also to have been Oberlin’s president from 1927 to 1945. As I worked, I liked to imagine that his benign shade was occasionally encouraging my efforts. If so, it may have been joined by that of Andrew Bongiorno, from whom I learned about Dante when I became his much younger colleague at Oberlin, and whose high standards of scholarship were always an inspiration to me. I never knew Wilkins, of course, but hearing Bongiorno talk about him gave me familiarity with his scholarly achievements long before I began to think of translating his favorite poet.

  My colleague Martha Collins made a particularly significant contribution to this project. She encouraged my commitment to meter and brought her own accurate ear and eye to the careful critique of my efforts, from an early stage on down to the completion. I owe her a great deal. I am also grateful to other readers who helped me polish and refine my efforts, especially Georgia N
ewman, my wife, and John Hobbs and David Walker, two other colleagues at Oberlin. Jonathan Galassi contributed many excellent suggestions that helped make the translations more consistently faithful to the Italian. Gaetano Prampolini very kindly read this introduction and pointed out some errors. Two monthlong residencies helped give me the time and concentration to complete this project, one from the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria in 2001, the other a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the New Mexico Institute for the Arts in 2002. For the help and encouragement I received at both places, my deepest thanks.

  A Powers Travel Grant from Oberlin College that enabled me to visit sites where Petrarch lived and worked, particularly the Vaucluse and the Fontagne de Sorgue, as well as Mount Ventoux, during the summer of 2002, was also instrumental to the completion of this project.

  Finally, if it does not seem too strange and awkward, let me thank my friend Petrarch. To occupy the world of another poet’s work at great length is to develop an intimacy that resembles friendship. There are bound to be quarrels and misunderstandings, but there is something that feels like mutual exchange, trust, and candid appraisal. Petrarch enjoyed his friendships and put a high value on them. So do I. Like others, I have found this man fascinating in his flawed humanity, admirable in the honesty and detail of his self-portraiture. His company has been a privilege. To honor it, I would like to close with the characterization that Wilkins used to preface his 1961 Life of Petrarch:

  He was and is remarkable for his awareness of the entire continent on which the drama of European life was being enacted; for his awareness of the reality of times past and times to come; for the breadth and variety of his own interest (he was, among many other things, a gardener, a fisherman, and a lutanist); for the high dedication of his writings; for his persistent belief in Rome as the rightful capital of a unified world, governed politically by an Emperor and religiously by a Pope; for his scholarly precocity and for the valiant industry of his old age; for the honors he received and for the hostilities he incurred; for his faithfulness to the study and writing that constituted his most important occupation; and most of all for the vast range, the deep loyalty, and the unfailing helpfulness of his friendships. (v)