Selected Sonnets—Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)

Death and the maiden

Statue of Petrarch by Alessandro Lazzarini in Arezzo, Italy

This week, I’ve explored the sonnets of Petrarch, and at some later date I’ll dig into Shakespeare’s. Petrarch lived in the fourteenth century (1304–74) and wrote in his native Italian, rather than in Latin. Most historians place him at the beginning of Italian Renaissance literature and Dante (1265–1321) at the end of medieval literature. Their lives overlapped by a few years. For today’s reflection, I read The Essential Petrarch, which contains English translations of 108 poems from the Canzoniere. The complete collection contains 366 poems (317 sonnets).

I admire two things more than all else in music: passion and structure. Unfortunately, one hardly ever finds them together in the same piece, since passion, if unconstrained, must shake off structural constraints. So while I may love a tone poem for its frenzied affirmation of the ineffable, I may also love a fugue when divinity peeks through its lacework. In Latin poetry, too, I love the wild passion of Catullus but also the absolute control of Horace. I say all this because I can think of no better way to describe Petrarch than to say he succeeded in marrying passion with structure.

Much of his poetry plays on the theme of his love for a married woman named Laura, whose identity (and even whose existence) scholars have debated for almost seven centuries. For twenty years before and ten years after Laura’s supposed death, he complained of what we would now label an addiction to a love that did him much harm and no good. Despite his desperation, she resisted his sexual advances. He knew the hopelessness of his efforts to court her, but he also knew her virtue only made him desire her more. He could not govern this beast within himself, and he often wrote of that lack of control.

My crazed desire has gone so far astray

pursuing one who turns in flight from me,

...

that now the more I call it back and point

it down the safe, sure track, the less it listens. (from Poem #6)

Over the course of his literary life, Petrarch pretty much invented the language and defined the contours of courtly love for the remainder of the Renaissance. Later poets who tried to write of love resorted to the same images, allusions, and themes Petrarch introduced. His love for Laura remained unrequited, so a forever unrequited love became the stock-in-trade of an army of Petrarchists. Likewise, countless young men wrote of their raging passion, forever unconsummated, that consumed them as an icy fire. Love equals torment. Petrarch himself explored these topics from so many angles over thousands of lines of poetry that there must have seemed hardly anything new for others to say. So if any single poem in the collection strikes one as ingenuous, one cannot remain unmoved at the obsession that drove him to craft one exquisite cry of despair after another for thirty-plus years. Indeed, I know of nothing else that matches Petrarch’s encyclopedic treatment of love’s passion. Even if one turns to music, no mere theme-and-variation approaches the grand scale of the Canzoniere. Perhaps Bach’s Art of Fugue, comes close to its technical accomplishment, even if not to its passion.

(Please excuse the following brief lecture. Before this week I knew very little about sonnets, and I don’t profess to know all that much now, so I welcome corrections, amplifications, or further reflections from anyone reading this post.)

Petrarch chose the sonnet as his poetic structure. He designed his sonnets in a way that became popular among later poets who imitated it, both for serious ends and as parodies. Contemporary poets still use it. The basic form consists of two unequal parts, separated by a volta, or shift in meaning of some sort. The shift might involve asking a question then answering it, or expressing a worry then dismissing it, or some such change. Whatever form the volta takes in Petrarch’s hands, it always occurrs between the eighth and ninth lines. The first part, the octave, consists of two quatrains or groups of four lines, rhymed as follows: a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. The second part, the sestet, consists or two tercets, or groups of three lines, whose rhyme pattern varies: commonly c-d-e, c-d-e, but c-d-c-d-c-d at other times. Whatever the case, the octave tends to intensify or build pressure, while the sestet tends to act as a sort of release.

Petrarch makes heavy use of end-stops rather than enjambment. In other words, poetic lines tend to pause at the end rather than flow into the following line. Thus, the meanings in Petrarch’s sonnets work together with the form, emphasizing it, rather than concealing it. The quatrains often serve as two distinct units of meaning, rather than one extended eight-line meaning. Furthermore, with an a-b-b-a rhyme scheme, the inner couplet (the b-b) tends to be more tightly bound together and the outer pair of rhymes (the a----a) tends to be more loosely related. Furthermore, Petrarch used hendecasyllables, lines of eleven syllables, following in the footsteps of Catullus. The meter of English poetry, in contrast relies more on the number of beats per line instead of the number of syllables. Despite all this patterning, Petrarch’s 311 sonnets retain a freshness and naturalness that few could ever imitate. A Petrarchan sonnet in the hands of a lesser poet could easily collapse into doggerel.

Finally, Petrarch worked and reworked certain quirks of the Italian language that make his sonnets impossible to adequately translate. The endings of Italian nouns, adjectives, and verbs follow strict grammatical patterns, making rhymes completely natural and almost impossible to avoid. The name “Laura” sounds enough like other words to permit an untranslatable wordplay. Il lauro (a masculine form) means “the laurel tree” or by metonymy, “poetry,” because painters and sculptors often portray lyric poets as wearing a laurel wreath (and we honor certain poets by designating them as poet laureates). So he often represents Laura as a tree. Laura has golden hair, and “aureo” means “golden.” And, as if that didn’t suffice, “l’aura” (a feminine form) means the gentle breeze. All these easy puns for Petrarch get relegated to footnotes for us poor English speakers.

So why do I say that Petrarch married passion with structure? We often think of love poetry as poems flattering or trying to seduce the poet’s beloved. Petrarch’s love poems—the ones we get to see—don’t express his love to Laura but describe it to an audience. He presents love as a wound that he has succumbed to or a trap that has snared him. The passion is sweet beyond endurance yet sheer torture. It has made him waste his life, while also making him famous. He despairs that Laura has never given in to his entreaties, but recognizes too that her resistance has in fact saved his soul from sin. In short, Petrarch describes himself as one crucified by passion, wanting and not wanting to want. But because he doesn’t share his direct pleas to Laura he doesn’t exhibit his torment or reproduce it on paper; he represents it.

He has taken one step back from the passion of loving and given the inchoate, ungovernable, wild beast of his madness the structure of art. The feeling remains raw, but by not allowing it to speak for itself, he contains it in graceful words and learned allusions. Maybe an analogy would help. Suppose in a fit of passion, I scream and throw buckets of paint at a canvas. The resulting mess expresses the passion but doesn’t represent it. Suppose further that I had set up multiple cameras and filmed myself creating my expressionistic work. Later, if I edit the various clips into a movie short, I could, depending on my skill, artfully represent the passion I had felt that particular day. I could create a montage of escalating fury that conveys my passion but does not result from it directly.

So, too, did Petrach represent his grief by trapping it in a beautifully crafted cage of words. Consider the opening lines of poem 264, (not a sonnet but a canzone).

I' vo pensando, et nel penser m'assale

una pietà sí forte di me stesso,

che mi conduce spesso

ad altro lagrimar ch'i' non soleva[.]

In English,

I keep on thinking and in thought I’m struck

by such a powerful pity for myself

that I’m brought frequently

to shed tears quite unlike those I once wept. (translation by Hainsworth)

Compare that to this dada sound poem, “Klink—Hratzvenga (Deathwail),” by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who displays the direct result of her grief in raw, inarticulate sounds

Ildrich mitzdonja—astatootch

Ninj—iffe kniek—

Ninj—iffe kniek!

Arr—karr—

Arrkarr—barr

Karrarr—barr—

Arr—

Arrkarr—

Mardar

Mar—dóórde—dar—

Mardoodaar!!!

(No translation available, lol)

You may think of these two samples as Promethean self-pity bound and unbound.

Just as the sonnet divides into two unequal parts, so does the entire Canzoniere. Part One contains 263 poems and part two contains 103. One might think of the break between the two parts as introducing a volta, as the poems in Part Two speak of Petrarch’s love for a now deceased Laura. Petrarch’s sonnets represent his beloved as having died in 1348, but he does not state a cause (at least I never saw a poem offering that detail). A lot of people in Italy died that year as the Black Plague decimated the population. The later poems continue to deal with his passion for Laura, but now her absence tortures him as had her chastity before. He longs for a spiritual union with her in Paradise, but, once again, she thwarts him because by committing the sin of suicide he would lose his entry into Heaven—a sort of Renaissance version of catch-22.

Throughout the Canzoniere Petrarch represents and reflects on his obsession with Laura. He doesn’t address these poems to her while she’s alive. He doesn’t write them to persuade her to return his affection, nor does he try to charm her with compliments. He worships her beauty, but always to an audience. In an interesting twist, though, Laura’s death actually places her in his audience, and he does sometimes address her soul in Part Two.

He explores many themes repeatedly. He complains while bragging about his love. He bemoans his failure to persuade her while admitting that he would not respect her if he had even once sated his lust. He rails against her refusal to give in to his advances, but also praises the strength of her virtue.

Anyone who can massage language so that it works at multiple levels of meaning, who can do so in fixed patterns of meter and rhyme, and who can nonetheless avoid twisting it into a sing-song jumble of words has my deepest admiration. This, Petrarch did. As Hainsworth puts it in the introduction to his book,

No one before Petrarch had managed, or perhaps wanted to manage, his mixture of fluency and complexity, which, in complete contrast to the disordered flux of his thoughts and feelings, has a literary order and clarity such as might be found in Horace or Ovid. (p. xxii)

The reader of Petrarch in translation faces a serious problem: Language itself. In Italian, a highly inflected language, rhyming comes naturally, but not so in English. So Hainsworth makes no attempt to match Petrarch’s rhyme scheme, and he changes the metric pattern from hendecasyllables to iambic pentameter. This saves his translation from becoming the sort of frightful contortion that scares many readers away from lyric poetry. Those choices do improve the clarity of the poems, but at the cost of much of its Italian charm.

I conclude with a small suggestion about how to approach a poem in translation. Let’s look for example at the second quatrain of poem #159. First, get an untranslated copy of the poem.

Qual nimpha in fonti, in selve mai qual dea,

chiome d'oro sí fino a l'aura sciolse?

quando un cor tante in sé vertuti accolse?

benché la somma è di mia morte rea.

Supposing you don’t speak the language of the original, get a good English translation. A tasteful translator will not just render the Italian into English, but will create a separate poem that captures as much of the original as the translator’s skill will allow, yet has its own poetic quality. However, before reading the translation, you might want to start by grasping the basic, non-poetic sense. For that, you have ChatGPT, a reasonably competent if pedestrian translator. Cutting and pasting the Italian passage into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Translate the following into simple English prose,” we get the following.

What nymph in streams, what goddess in forests, let their golden hair flow so beautifully in the breeze? When did a heart gather so many virtues within itself, even though my death is the ultimate consequence?

That seems simple enough. But the last phrase raises a question. How do we make sense of “my death is the ultimate consequence”? With that question in mind, now read the human translation.

What bathing nymph, what goddess in the woods,

loosed to the wind hair of such perfect gold?

When did one hear combine so many virtues,

although the highest’s guilty of my death?

What ChatGPT mistakenly renders as “ultimate consequence,” Hainsworth interprets as Laura’s unnamed highest virtue. Somehow her highest virtue kills the poet. Any guesses about that virtue? If you need further help, a footnote explains, “Laura’s highest virtue is her sexual purity.” Aha! That makes sense: A frequent refrain, expressed in a new way. Now glancing back at the original, we may notice that in the second line, Petrarch slips in a pun on his goddess’s name when he mentions the wind, l’aura.

If this sort of thing pleases you as it does me, you may also appreciate that the Canzoniere contains exactly one poem for every day of a leap year. Coincidence or art?

Next week, I’ll read Justine, the first novel of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

The Essential Petrarch, edited and translated by Peter Hainsworth

Die Kunst Der Fuge, J. S. Bach, performed by the Julliard String Quartet

Justine, By Lawrence Durrell (Volume 1 of the Alexandria Quartet)

The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell (all four volumes in one book)

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