Canzoniere

Francesco Petrarch, Francesco Petrarca, J.G. Nichols

• Publisher: Fyfield Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781857544510
• eBook ISBN: 9781847776129
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

PART I

Poems written in the lifetime of madonna Laura

1 Voi 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.

2 Per 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My forces had withdrawn into my heart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.

3 Era 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.

4 Que’ 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 heave...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Poems written in the lifetime of madonna Laura
• PART II: Poems written after the death of madonna Laura
• Copyright