Petrarch's Canzoniere , livre ebook

Barbican Press - Francesco Petrarch ,
traduit par Peter Thornton

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213 pages

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Francesco Petrarch’s Canzoniere (translated in English as ‘Scattered Rhymes’) is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their deep exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Written over the course of forty years (approximately between 1328-1368), this collection includes 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 4 madrigals and 7 ballate. These Scattered Rhymes almost always return to Laura, a women who Petrarch loves deeply, whom he first saw on a Good Friday. On this same day, some years later, Laura died. But Petrarch’s love does not wane, in fact at points it burns brighter. Il Canzoniere also serves as a valuable contemporary insight into 14th century religion and the role of the papacy in Christendom. Petrarch’s work is one of civilization’s most immaculate achievements. Michael R. G. Spiller regards Il Canzoniere as ‘the single greatest inspiration for the love poetry of Renaissance Europe until well into the seventeenth century’. Following his acclaimed translation of Dante’s Inferno, which ‘immediately joins ranks with the very best available in English’ (Dr Richard Lansing), Peter Thornton brings the poetry of Petrarch to the 21st Century in direct and luminous verse.

Sujets

World Literature

Themes

Subjects

Medieval

renaissance

HISTORY

Edad Media

Ancient history

Loss

Middle Ages

Italy

Poetry

My Last Duchess

Erotica

Grief

Ancient

Love

Death

Europe

Informations

Publié par	Barbican Press
Date de parution	10 janvier 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909954717
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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iii

Petrarch s Canzoniere
Scattered Rhymes
Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta in a new verse translation by
PETER THORNTON
v

For Catherine Thornton
Qui mai pi no, ma rivedrenne altrove vi
Contents

Title Page Dedication Translator s Preface Abbreviations PART ONE PART TWO Appendix About the Author Also by Peter Thornton from Barbican Press Copyright
vii
Translator s Preface
Like most Anglophones of a certain age, I came to Petrarch in youth through sixteenth and seventeenth century English poetry - direct translations by Wyatt and Surrey, more generic imitations by many sonneteers. As years went on, I read other translations of Petrarch sonnets, but my sense of him derived largely from his general reputation as the poet unhappy in love. In middle age, when I finally began reading Scattered Rhymes in the Italian, my eyes were opened.
I discovered a poet who was new to me and I understood for the first time why his name still echoes almost 700 years after his death. I experienced a poet of intelligence, whose verse could be surprisingly vivid and evoke strong emotional reactions as it developed over hundreds of poems a subtle analysis of erotic desire and the poet s vain struggles against it, the ecstasy it brings, its inevitable frustration and resulting anguish, and the possibility of transforming the experience, including the anguish, into art. I was seduced by Petrarch s exquisite turns of phrase, his ability to combine strong emotion with delicate expression and his harmonies of sound that can transform what might otherwise be an ordinary verse into something memorable. Among other things, I had known only some sonnets before. It is true that sonnets predominate in the collection, but some of the canzoni - the extended, high-cultural form of lyric poetry at the time - are among Petrarch s best poems.
Not having found much like this in the bits of Petrarch I had read in English over the years, I thought of translating Petrarch the way he viii sounded to me. This has proved to be particularly challenging. Charles S. Singleton remarked in the 1940s that translating Petrarch was much more difficult than translating Dante s Comedy because the essence of Petrarch s poetry depends so largely on the delicate interplay of word and phrase and rhythm ( Italica 24.2 (1947), pp. 177-79). Having published a verse translation of the Inferno several years ago, I definitely see Singleton s point, though I think his formulation rather slights Petrarch, whose greatness depends on more than exquisite phrasing. I could not, however, resist the challenge of seeing what I could do with these lyrics (preferably using off-rhyme in at least the sonnets), for which I set aside my draft Purgatorio .
Given the impossibility of reproducing Petrarch s verbal music in English, I decided that my goal was not to convey the matter of Petrarch s sonnets and canzoni in adequately carpentered English that closely followed his grammar, let alone his difficult Italian syntax, which the Italian commentators not infrequently feel they need to explain to Italian readers. My goal was rather to create modern English poems that made Petrarch present to a contemporary Anglophone reader, conveying emotional impact on their own, singing and weeping believably in the idiom of our day, the verses pulsing with a life of their own, so that to some extent the poems would constitute independent creations. In Scattered Rhymes , as opposed to the Comedy , one is forced to act more like a poet, not merely a translator, or one quickly drowns - because a word-by-word translation often results in a particularly prosy bundle of lines whose syllables have at least been carefully counted by the translator.
Licensing oneself to act as a poet, however, could all too quickly get out of hand, allowing the original Petrarch, with his complex and shifting personality, to escape. To cabin that tendency I imposed a boundary condition: my poems would remain translations, because they would not betray Petrarch s texts. They would remain recognizable. Admittedly betraying a text is a broad concept, one that applies to performance as much as translation. Does Laurence Olivier s Richard III ix betray Shakespeare s text? What about Ian McKellen s? This suggests at the least that a poem leaves room for different voicings of which a translator may take advantage - beyond that he must trust his conscience not to stray beyond what Petrarch is saying and feeling.
The above is simply my own na ve version of the millennial debate between close translation and free translation, intended to let the reader know where I stand in the matter. The reader will have to judge the extent to which I have succeeded in creating real modern English poems out of Petrarch s texts. One thing I notice is that my poems at least give voice to some of the varied moods in the Laura cycle not typically associated with Petrarch.
In 22.31-36 the poet s erotic fantasies grow warm:

One night with her - farewell the setting sun,
and no one there to see us but the stars -
only one night and let there be no dawn!
And let her not turn into green-leaf wood
And so escape my arms, as on the day
Apollo once pursued her here on earth.
In RVF 52 the poet sees Laura in a fictional guise:

However much Diana may have pleased
the lover who by like chance spied her bare
amid the frigid water, I no less
delighted in the shy hill shepherdess
washing a wisp of veil to keep her hair,
glinting with gold, protected from the breeze.
And even now, when the sky burns above,
she makes me shiver with a chill of love.
82.1-8 finds the poet in a rare mood of rebellion:

My love for you has never lost its force,
nor will it, Lady, while my life endures;
but I am weary of my constant tears x
and hatred for myself has run its course.
I d rather mark my grave with a blank stone
than have your name, to tell my fate, inscribed
on marble where my flesh would lie, deprived
of soul with which it could have still been one.
In 90.1-8 he remembers seeing Laura in a moment that haunts him, returning in poem after poem:

Her golden hair, disheveled by the breeze,
was tangled in a thousand pretty knots;
innumerable lovely glinting lights
blazed, as they do no longer, in her eyes.
It seemed to me I saw her face become
colored by pity, whether true or not,
and since I had love s tinder in my heart
is it surprising that I soon caught flame?
In 126.40-52 he experiences ecstasy when he recalls seeing Laura in nature:

From lovely boughs rained down
(still sweet in memory)
showers of snowy blossoms in her lap;
and there she simply sat,
meek amid so much glory,
already smothered in a loving cloud.
This bud fell on her dress,
that one on her blond curls,
which that day looked no less
than gleaming gold and pearl;
some landed in the water, some on shore,
one in a graceful swirl
turning as is to say, Love triumphs here .
In 129.40-52 he is alone in nature and experiences ecstasy seeing her everywhere until the illusion dissipates: xi

Often I have (who will believe my tale?)
seen her alive in the transparent water,
the smooth trunk of a beech, on the green grass,
in a white cloud, so lovely she would force
Leda to see the beauty of her daughter
lost like a star the rising sun s rays veil.
The more remote the place
where I may be, the lonelier the shore,
the lovelier my mind imagines her;
when the truth dissipates
that sweet illusion, right there I sink down
cold, a dead stone upon the living stone,
shaped like a man who thinks and weeps and writes.
A glut of examples and we are still early in the collection. In 289.1-8 Laura has died, still young:

My quickening flame, fair beyond all the fair
to whom heaven was so generous and kind
has now returned - too early, to my mind -
to her own homeland and her proper star.
Now I awaken and I see she spurned
my ardor for my profit, not my loss,
adopting an expression sweet yet cross
to damp the youthful urge with which I burned.
In 311.1-8, the poet is lamenting Laura s death,

The nightingale that so melodiously
sobs for his young, perhaps, or his dear mate,
floods the dark fields with sweetness and the sky,
as skillful heartfelt notes keep pouring out;
all night it seems his sobs accompany
mine, stirring memories of my own hard fate;
for there is no one I can blame but me,
who thought no goddess subject to Death s might. xii
Here Petrarch has lifted the nightingale vignette whole from Virgil, but has made it completely his own. I hope in my smaller way to have done something similar with Petrarch.
As for whether I have betrayed Petrarch s texts in my effort to make them new, the main charge against me would be that I have often relied on paraphrase. Such reliance is inevitable because I chose to use off-rhyme at least in the sonnets, which I believe greatly enhances the ability of the verse to sing. In addition, however, I have often found paraphrase necessary to bring out my understanding of the meaning of a passage or my sense of its feeling.
To begin with the basics here: I have translated the text of the Canzoniere (the usual Italian title of the work) from the second edition of Marco Santagata (Mondadori 2004). Petrarch s poetry generally looks straightforward and amenable to word-by-word translation. I find that re-reading it, however, often reveals surprising ambiguities and uncertainties. This is confirmed when I turn to modern Italian commentaries, in which interpretations of passage after passage are contested.
Accordingly, my translation has been informed to an extent by Robert M. Durling s standard English prose translation; but by far my greatest influence has been the commentaries of Santagata in the volume cited above and of Ugo Dotti in Canzoniere (Donzelli 1996). In addition, I have reviewed and been influenced by the commentaries of Giovanni Ponte in Rime Sparse (Mursia 1976), Daniele