Following Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374)

The following translation, from a language that I can muddle through with the help of a dictionary but in which I am not and never have been close to even literarily fluent, is something that I decided to undertake in order to demonstrate a point about translation generally. My views on translation are in a tradition that, as I see it, includes Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the point is to invite an understanding of the original writer on the part of the reader of the translation, not simply to make the material seamlessly understandable in the target language. Sometimes this means that a good, from this standpoint, translation will seem unidiomatic or even deliberately exoticized by the standards of the target language.

But wasn’t there, especially among the Victorians, an alternative practice of translating Romance-language poets very differently, to the point that the resulting style was clearly that of the translator’s own poetic work in English? Elizabeth Barrett Browning has a whole collection of Sonnets from the Portuguese that are her own work plain and simple, based only on the vague ambiences of actual Portuguese poetry. You also see this with Rossettian translations of authors like Dante and Villon. Petrarch commonly came in for this treatment, so when I found an Italian-language edition of Petrarch on the one-dollar shelf of a local used bookstore, I decided that it might be interesting to try my hand at the same general approach using one of the sonnets that this book provided me.

I chose a sonnet that is about Petrarch’s muse Laura and that has the abba-abba-cde-cde rhyme scheme with which English sonneteers tend to have so much trouble. I kept the rhyme scheme and meter of the original; this involved driving a coach and horses through some of the more direct and clearly-only-idiomatic-in-Italian renderings that I would normally have preferred (such as the puns on “Laura,” which it was a shame to lose entirely). Here’s the original (from Bietti’s “I Classici Popolari” series, published in Basiano in 1966), and here’s what I came out with:

Sonetto LXXXIX. A Valchiusa, patria di Laura, si sente al sicuro d’ogni bufera e il suo cuore arde d’amore.

Qui dove mezzo son, Sennuccio mio,
(cosí ci foss'io intero, et voi contento),
venni fuggendo la tempesta e 'l vento
c'ànno súbito fatto il tempo rio.

Qui son securo: et vo' vi dir perch'io
non come soglio il folgorar pavento,
et perché mitigato, nonché spento,
né-micha trovo il mio ardente desio.

Tosto che giunto a l'amorosa reggia
vidi onde nacque l'aura dolce et pura
ch'acqueta l'aere, et mette i tuoni in bando,

Amor ne l'alma, ov'ella signoreggia,
raccese 'l foco, et spense la paura:
che farrei dunque gli occhi suoi guardando?

❦

Sonnet LXXXIX. In Laura’s hometown of Vaucluse, he is at port in the storms; his heart burns with love for her.

Here in my half-life, Senuccio, half-self, friend,
Though would that I were altogether, entire,
I’ve come through storm, through tumult, foment, mire,
Which straightway and cruelly my course would bend—

—yet here I am in haven. Now attend
To why I fear not, as usual, storm and fire,
And to why, as well, ardent desire,
Has not in me waned, still less found its end—

—When I saw the palace where love reigns,
And felt its fair breeze, sweet and pure and calm,
Which cancels lightning-glares and thunder-cries,
Embers blazed in my soul, love’s joys, love’s pains,
And terror vanished in my heart’s burning balm.
How much more so, to look in Laura’s eyes?