On Petrarch’s Canzoniere: A New Translation – Translated by A.M. Juster
In his essay ‘Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca’ (1951), Gianfranco Contini elaborates his influential dichotomy between the plurlinguismo of Dante and the unilinguismo of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. By plurilingualism, Contini intends not only different languages such as Latin, Italian and Old Occitan, but also, and more importantly, a plurality of voices, styles, tones, and linguistic registers, which in Dante’s oeuvre are the fruit of incessant experimentation and theoretical reflection. Unilingualism, by contrast, indicates a unity of voice, style and register that embodies the Canzoniere’s absolute poetic vision, understood linguistically as a harmony of tone and lexicon that avoids extremes of high or low style, and is constructed on, but at the same time far removed from the functional and practical language of everyday communication, resulting in a perfect coherence and uniformity of style, while lacking Dante’s experimentation and theoretical underpinnings.
Contini avers that ‘we moderns feel closer to Dante’s temperament,’ and while the Anglophone world has by no means ignored Petrarch over the past century or so, his work has not enjoyed the same degree of cultural appeal and influence as that of Il Sommo Poeta, beginning with the major Anglo-American modernists and continuing to the present. Ezra Pound’s comments on Petrarch from his essay on Guido Cavalcanti, published in 1934, may perhaps be read as symptomatic of the anti-Petrarchan tendency in the modernist sensibility. Commencing with architecture, Pound draws a distinction between the ‘medieval clean line’ and what he calls ‘medieval niggle.’ He praises Byzantium for bringing forth ‘the best architecture, or at least the best inner structure [...] for proportions, for ornament flat on the walls, and not bulging and bumping and indulging in bulbous excrescense.’ This clean line is revealed in the Byzantine architecture of Sicily, in St. Hilaire of Poitiers, in the bare Romanesque of the Duomo of San Leo, the Duomo of Modena and of San Zeno in Verona, against which Pound opposes ‘niggly Angoulême, the architectural ornament of bigotry, superstition, and mess […] accompanied by bad and niggled sculpture.’ The west end of the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre of Angoulême is dominated by a twenty-meter high screen façade with arcades, featuring more than seventy sculptures representing scenes from the Ascension and the Last Judgment, interspersed with others. The theme of the Last Judgment, and in particular of the suffering of the damned as portrayed there, exemplifies what Pound sees as the ‘hell-obsession’ of ‘idiotic asceticism and belief that the body is evil,’ which he associates with ‘Christian prudery’ and ‘monastic thought.’ Pound’s ‘medieval niggle’ might be understood as embodied in the screen façade itself, which the University of Pittsburgh’s Glossary of Medieval Art and Architecture defines as ‘a facade which is so highly decorated with sculpture or other decorative elements that it acts as a screen placed in front of the facade,’ and ‘may seem to hide the face of the building from view.’ If, as Pound states in the essay The Serious Artist, ‘[t]he touchstone of an art is its precision,’ then the merely and excessively decorative or ornamental, insofar as it obscures the ‘clear lines and proportions’ of the definite meaning of the artist, and is not an integral part of the whole, but is instead ‘bulging and bumping and indulging in bulbous excrescense,’ is indicative of a loss of values and a consequent impoverishment of art. Pound attributes this loss to ‘lumping and to lack of dissociation,’ which arguably characterizes this type of façade.
The cleanness and harmony of the ‘poeti dei primi secoli’ and of Byzantine and spare Romanesque architecture, for Pound, represent a power, or virtù (‘All these are clean, all without hell-obsession.’), while the merely decorative trifle and inharmonious agglomeration of figures, especially those figures representing the hell-obsessed Last Judgment, epitomized by Angoulême, result from the neglect of virtù and a subsequent impoverishment that would infect much later art.
However, before this change appeared in visual art, Pound says, it began in poetry with Petrarch, whose work lies on the other side of a ‘great gulf’ from Cavalcanti’s:
In Guido the ‘figure’, the strong metamorphic or ‘picturesque’ expression is there with the purpose to convey or to interpret a definite meaning. In Petrarch it is ornament, the prettiest ornament he could find, but not an irreplaceable ornament, or one that he couldn’t have used just about as well somewhere else. In fact he very often does use it, and them, somewhere, and nearly everywhere, else, all over the place.
Pound reads a ‘bulbous excrescence’ into Petrarch’s repetition of words, figures of speech and images, into his typical mode of proceeding by means of accumulation, association and abrupt contrast, as well as into his incessant circling around and back to emotions and various nuances and shades of meaning and of feeling, which obscure, on Pound’s view, ‘the clear lines and proportions’ that he so admired in the earlier Tuscans and the Troubadours. Additionally, Petrarch’s penitential turn, his fraught, Augustinian introspection and searching exploration along the torta via, in which aspects of experience and their opposites collapse into one another, resulting in ambiguities and shades of feeling, are antithetical to Pound’s own aesthetic and sensibilities. His inability to see the strength and value of Petrarch’s work arises from the particular horizon of his moment, and from the requirements of his own poetics and artistic stance as situated in that conjuncture, since it was arguably the clear line, precision, and the ‘neatness of scalpel-cut’ that his own early poetry lacked.
He sums up his aversion by dismissing the language of Petrarch and the Petrarchists as being ‘of no interest to the practising writer or to the student of comparative dynamics in language, the collectors of bric-à-brac are outside our domain.’ For Pound, the Petrarchan model could not feasibly be of use to the poet working in a context felt to represent the vestiges or the dregs of a tradition originating with Petrarch himself. It is perhaps the very imitability and influence of Petrarch’s style, its having become representative of the ideal of ‘poesie,’ that would blind one in Pound’s position to its considerable strengths.
Pound’s criticisms may also be read through the lens of his rejection, in the same essay, of the sonnet form itself, which, while employed by the early Italian poets whom Pound admired, would come to be closely associated with Petrarch and his imitators. The relatively strict form of the standard sonnet allied it with ‘the sequence of the metronome,’ understood as a regular and pre-existing metrical pattern, which Pound rejected in favor of composition to ‘the sequence of the musical phrase.’ As Petrarchism spread throughout Europe, the sonnet was the form that enjoyed the most fortune, and thus ‘[t]he prestige of the sonnet in English is a relic of insular ignorance.’ Pound goes on to say that:
The sonnet was not a great poetic invention. The sonnet occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His ‘genius’ consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter.
Pound here accepts the theory according to which the sonnet originated as an adaptation of the canzone stanza, and the implications of this claim have important consequences for how he understands the sonnet as a form. The canzone is a composition made up of a varying number of stanzas, each of which is the same as regards the number of lines, the length of each line, and the rhyme scheme. However, there is no fixed number of stanzas or lines, or order of lines of each length, or fixed rhyme scheme, and thus the form itself is quite variable.
Given the above, it is apparent why Pound considered the sonnet ‘an ending or at least a decline of metric invention.’ When the stanza form of the canzone was adapted to create the sonnet, and then as the standard sonnet increasingly became a fixed form, the variability of the canzone stanza was lost. This loss, on Pound’s view, led to a loss of power and precision, as the attempt to force one’s material into a fixed form inevitably affects the organization of thought and discourse. Pound sees this also as a move away from the canzone’s connection to music, as this is the primary feature of the canzone in De vulgari eloquentia, which Pound applies to poetry more generally. For this reason, he claims that ‘by A.D. 1290 the sonnet is already ceasing to be lyric, it is already the epistle without a tune, it is in a state of becoming, and tends already to oratorical pronunciamento.’ Thus the sonnet, and by extension, Petrarch as the source of its popularity, embodies a degeneration of the art, since Pound believed that ‘poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together.’
T. S. Eliot quotes Pound approvingly in his essay Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry:
[Pound] has said himself that when one has the proper material for a sonnet, one should use the sonnet form; but that it happens very rarely to any poet to find himself in possession of just the block of stuff which can perfectly be modelled into the sonnet.
Here Pound and Eliot detect an incongruence of inventio and elocutio in the use of fixed form: there is a proper elocutio for certain ideas, experiences, content, and in the modern epoch, so it would seem, the sonnet is almost never adequate for this material. This sentiment is echoed in William Carlos Williams’ statement that ‘all sonnets say the same thing,’ for the form determines what can be said insofar as it influences how it is said. Similarly, in a journal entry from 1900, Wallace Stevens wrote that sonnets can be ‘tremendously out of place: in real life where things are quick, unaccountable, responsive.’
The first volume of Eliot’s Complete Prose also contains a ‘Syllabus for a Tutorial Class in Modern English Literature’ from 1918, which indicates that he planned to teach on the ‘[p]opularity of Petrarch’ and the ‘[u]sual artificiality of the sonnet.’ In the essay Prose and Verse (1921), Eliot associates artificiality with ‘Alexandrianism, or more truly Georgianism, [which] is present when verse becomes a language, a set of feelings, a style quite remote from life.’ Petrarch, or perhaps more accurately, Petrarchism might be seen as an example of Alexandrianism or Georgianism, an example of what Pound calls ‘the prettiest ornament,’ but nevertheless merely ornament, merely artificial, and not something that arises out of the necessity of getting across a definite meaning inherent in the nature of the material.
A similar opposition between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ form poetry, and the association of each with notions of the ‘artificial’ and the ‘natural,’ was expressed by later poets, such as Charles Olson in his essay Projective Verse (1950), or Robert Lowell, who formulated an opposition between ‘cooked’ and ‘raw’ poetry in his now famous speech upon receiving the National Book Award in 1960 for his volume Life Studies. These oppositions, and in particular the illusion that one mode of writing is more ‘natural,’ more ‘authentic,’ or adheres more closely to the material of modern life than another—not to mention the rather silly political positions that writers of various camps have attempted to impose upon them—cannot but appear naive and simplistic from our current standpoint. Indeed, already in 1918, T. S. Eliot recognized that ‘[t]here are not, as a matter of fact, two kinds of verse, the strict and the free; there is only a mastery which comes of being so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular purpose at hand.’ Yet as styles and schools of poetry have proliferated over the past century, the Petrarchan vein, while still retaining a certain degree of influence, even if only negatively, has remained marginal in a way that Dante’s has not, waiting perhaps for the right confluence of conditions to rise to prominence again.
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While Contini’s dichotomy possesses some measure of descriptive utilitly, it undoubtedly simplifies and misrepresents Petrarch’s work. In many ways, A.M. Juster’s Canzoniere: A New Translation serves as a useful corrective to the stereotypes that have accumulated around the sequence. In his extraordinary introduction, Andrew Frisardi attempts to counter some of these stereotypes, emphasizing the experimental nature of Petrarch’s poetics, its religious and spiritual foundations, the profoundly personal, intimate and even, to use a term that, appropriately, possesses both Augustinian and twentieth-century American poetic resonance, confessional nature of the poems, as well as their formal, stylistic and tonal variety—all features neglected in the general perception of Petrarch’s art.
Although poets have been translating Petrarch into English since Chaucer first made the attempt, it was only in the nineteenth century that the entire Canzoniere was first translated. When Beatrice Corrigan published her survey of the works of Petrarch available in English in 1973, the only complete English translation of the Canzoniere then in print was Anna Maria Armi’s, originally published in 1946 and reprinted in 1968. Robert Durling’s philologically informed prose version would appear in 1976, and another twenty years would pass before James Wyatt Cook and Mark Musa would each publish their own verse translations. So far the new millennium has seen at least five verse translations of the complete Canzoniere, by J. G. Nichols (2000), A. S. Kline (2001), David Young (2004), Peter Thornton (2023), and A. M. Juster (2026), not to mention a number of translations of selections from the book. While the number of translations of the Commedia is far greater, this increase in attention to the Canzoniere is perhaps indicative of larger changes in literary culture, rendering Petrarch more palatable, or perhaps more necessary, in the current climate.
In his 2017 review of Elaine Fantham’s translation of Petrarch’s Selected Letters, Juster observes that contemporary readers are faced with two major obstacles to the appreciation of Petrarch’s poetry: the lack of a compelling translation of the Canzoniere in its entirety, and a presentist reading of its language as clichéd. Juster believes that the first of these obstacles is due to previous translators’ having neglected the musical qualities inherent in the meter and rhyme of Petrarch’s verse. The second obstacle is rather more intractable, in that it is a question of historical positioning: the pervasive influence of Petrarch’s tropes and phrasing on later poets almost inevitably leads a general audience to read his work as clichéd, whereas in its time it was not. The translator may remind the reader of this fact in an introduction or note, but enabling the reader to experience this freshness in the face of centuries of imitation is another matter entirely. In his Translator’s Note, Juster states that his goal is ‘to imitate closely Petrarch’s music and fresh language, while being faithful to his text.’ Juster has done a genuine service for twenty-first-century Anglophone readers by producing a translation that revitalizes the Petrarchan project in English.
In a move of prodigious boldness, Juster has set for himself the seemingly impossible, Oulipian task of translating the various metrical structures and rhyme schemes of the Canzoniere, which consists of 366 poems: 317 sonnets, twenty-nine canzoni, nine sestinas (including a double sestina), seven ballate and four madrigals. That he is largely successful is a testament to his skill as both translator and versifier, as well as to his determination to settle neither for half measures nor half rhymes.
The sonnet Quand’io son tutto vòlto in quella parte (18) provides a particularly impressive example of the technical demands Juster sets himself and the ingenuity with which he responds to them. Here is the Italian text:
Quand’io son tutto vòlto in quella parte
ove ’l bel viso di madonna luce,
et m’è rimasa nel pensier la luce
che m’arde et strugge dentro a parte a parte,
i’ che temo del cor che mi si parte,
et veggio presso il fin de la mia luce,
vommene in guisa d’orbo, senza luce,
che non sa ove si vada et pur si parte.
Cosí davanti ai colpi de la morte
fuggo: ma non sí ratto che ’l desio
meco non venga come venir sòle.
Tacito vo, ché le parole morte
farian pianger la gente; et i’ desio
che le lagrime mie si spargan sole.
Even the reader with no Italian will notice that this poem follows one of the standard rhyme schemes of the Petrarchan sonnet; however, instead of different words at each line end, it appears to repeat the same word at each position in the rhyme scheme. This technique is called rima equivoca, and consists in rhyming words that are phonically identical, but which differ from each other in some way, either because they are etymologically unrelated homophones, are different senses of the same word, or are different parts of speech. For example, in the poem above, the word parte is a noun in the first line, part of an adverbial phrase in the fourth, a verb meaning ‘breaks’ or ‘separates’ in line five, and a verb meaning ‘depart’ in line eight; the word luce is a verb in line two, a noun meaning ‘light’ in line three, a noun meaning ‘life’ in line 6, and a noun meaning ‘vision’ or ‘sight’ in line seven; morte is a noun in line nine and an adjective in line twelve; desio is a noun in line ten and a verb in line thirteen; sole is a verb in line eleven and an adjective in line fourteen. Here is Juster’s translation:
When I return to focus on the part
of town illuminated by the light
of her bright face, I sense remains of light
that melt, then slowly sear me part by part,
and since I fear my heart, which breaks apart,
and peer each day through ever-dimming light,
I plod like someone lost and blind to light
who nonetheless resolves that he must part,
and so I flee before the mortal fight,
although not so rapidly, for even still
desire comes with me, as is its wont.
I do not speak, for people would not fight
back tears if they could hear my words fall still,
and tears I shed alone are what I want.
First of all, one notices that Juster has mostly rendered the form of the rima equivoca into English (‘apart’ in line five is a slight exception to this). Although the word ‘light’ is not used in completely different senses or parts of speech each time, the other line-endings are: ‘part’ is a noun, an adverbial phrase (part by part), an adverb (apart), and a verb; ‘fight’ is a noun and a verb; ‘still’ is an adverb and an adjective; and ‘wont’ is a noun while ‘want’ is a verb. Juster’s ingenious solution to the formal constraints presented by this sonnet is a paragon of translation, and one of the finest examples of his artistry when faced with the extremes of Petrarch’s technical versification.
Juster is adept at finding English equivalents of other sorts of what in Italian are known as rime tecniche, or technical rhymes, such as rima derivata, in which one of the rhyming words is derived from the other, such as foregone/gone for torna/distorna in Il successor di Karlo (27), or the rime riche of ‘may/dismay’ in 194. Equally impressive is the extraordinary way that Juster translates the l’aura/Laura pun in the sestina Là ver’ l’aurora (239) by alternating the name Laura with the word ‘aura’ modified by adjectives ending with /l/, ‘gentle aura’ and ‘mortal aura,’ although one wishes that he had been able to make this work in the final stanza and the envoy. These examples illustrate Juster’s facility in rendering some of the more complex formal qualities of Petrarch’s poetry in English.
A similar dexterity is present in Juster’s treatment of the linked rhymes, both end-rhyme and internal rhyme, of the coblas unissonans of Verdi panni (29), the first two stanzas of which run as follows:
Verdi panni, sanguigni, oscuri o persi
non vestí donna unquancho
né d’òr capelli in bionda treccia attorse,
sí bella com’è questa che mi spoglia
d’arbitrio, et dal camin de libertade
seco mi tira, sí ch’io non sostegno
alcun giogo men grave.
Et se pur s’arma talor a dolersi
l’anima a cui vien mancho
consiglio, ove ’l martir l’adduce in forse,
rappella lei da la sfrenata voglia
súbita vista, ché del cor mi rade
ogni delira impresa, et ogni sdegno
fa ’l veder lei soave.
In violet, green, black or crimson finery
no lady ever wore a thing,
or made with golden hair, a twisted chain
as fair as one to whom I acquiesce,
and on my path to liberty she steers
my way so that no yokes I’m bearing might
be any heavier than these.
And if my soul at times adds weaponry
to whine (for it needs counseling),
whenever it has doubts because of pain
her very vision calls my lawlessness
to leave my soul, for in my heart she clears
away my crazy actions, and her sight
can sweeten all discourtesies.
In this type of canzone, derived from Provencal models, the lines within the stanza do not rhyme; instead, each line rhymes with the corresponding line of all of the other stanzas of the poem, thus the first line of each stanza rhymes with the first line of every other stanza, the second line of each rhymes with the second line of every other, and so forth. Additionally, the first foot of the fourth and sixth lines of each stanza create an internal rhyme with the first foot of the fourth and sixth lines of every other stanza.
He skillfully captures the halting rhythms in the incipit of Pace non trovo (134):
Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra;
e temo, et spero; et ardo, et son un ghiaccio;
et volo sopra ’l cielo, et giaccio in terra;
et nulla stringo, et tutto ’l mondo abbraccio.
I find no peace, and war is not for me.
I dread and hope, and burn and freeze, and fly
above the heavens, and on dirt I lie;
I clench the world but grasp futility.
The elegance and rhythmic fluidity of the canzone Chiare, fresche et dolci acque, are transmitted with exquisite assonance and alliteration:
Chiare, fresche et dolci acque,
ove le belle membra
pose colei che sola a me par donna;
gentil ramo ove piacque
(con sospir’ mi rimembra)
a lei di fare al bel fiancho colonna;
herba et fior’ che la gonna
leggiadra ricoverse
co l’angelico seno;
aere sacro, sereno,
ove Amor co’ begli occhi il cor m’aperse […]
Clear, fresh, sweet waters where
the only one I call
a lady let her lovely limbs abide,
kind branch that pleased her there
(with sighing I recall)
to build a column for her graceful side,
flowers and grass that hide
in her fine skirt, above
it her angelic breast,
and air serene and blessed
where with fair eyes my heart was freed by Love […]
Many more examples could be reproduced here, but these should suffice to demonstrate Juster’s skill and prowess.
As is nearly inevitable in an extended translation subject to strict formal constraints, there are occasional lapses in form and instances of awkward phrasing. For example, in certain canzoni the line lengths are not consistent from stanza to stanza, as the form requires, or a tetrameter line appears unexpectedly an otherwise pentameter sonnet. Other times, the phrasing seems somewhat peculiar, as in 319.6, ‘those placing hoping in you are cavalier,’ where it is unclear why the translator has chosen ‘hoping,’ rather than ‘hope,’ which would seem more natural and fits the scansion better. These, however, are minor criticisms relative to the overall achievement of the volume.
Overcoming the second obstacle mentioned above is in some ways a more daunting task. Setting aside the challenges of form, the translator is faced with stylistic questions of greater magnitude: the style, language and imagery of the Canzoniere have exercised such an extensive influence on the poetry of the intervening centuries that what was powerful, new and fresh in the fourteenth century has in our own become the ultimate cliché of the ‘poetic.’ Petrarch’s images, phrasing, and figures of speech have become so naturalized and so pervasive that for many centuries to write lyric poetry more or less meant to imitate the Petrarch of the Canzoniere, to such a degree that it led Pier Paolo Pasolini to exclaim that his work had become ‘illegible’ to us, that it is nearly impossible to read through the centuries of accumulated poetic practice and history that have molded the contemporary relation to those images, phrasing and figures of speech. This illegibility of the Canzoniere is perhaps nowhere better seen than in Pound’s comments discussed above. Yet the freshness and newness of the Canzoniere are powerfully evoked by Maurizio Vitale in the introduction to La lingua del Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) di Francesco Petrarca.
Whoever reads and examines, from a stylistic and linguistic point of view, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta […] after having carefully studied the texts of the poets of the first Sicilian school, the poetic compositions of Guittone d’Arezzo and the Siculo-Tuscan versifiers, the lyric poetry of Dante and his work in the elevated style, and finally the songs of the dolce stil novo poets, immediately realizes that they are in the presence of a poetry that, in keeping with its greater richness of intellectual and spiritual themes and with the more intense and extensive psychological and poetic experience, is entirely different and astonishingly new.
The newness and boldness of language in the Canzoniere, its consolidation of the linguistic and poetic experimentation of the previous one hundred years of Italian vernacular poetry with a profound Augustinian sense of the self and its religious commitment in a Janus-faced achievement that represents one of the crowns of vernacular writing in Italy and of European Christian culture, while at the same time opening up new vistas that would alter the development of later literature in profound ways, is something that the contemporary reader may be able to understand intellectually, but which proves difficult for those who have not had the opportunity to study Petrarch’s predecessors to feel or grasp in any concrete way. This illegibility of Petrarch is in large part due precisely to the weight of tradition and his influence upon it.
In order to bring out Petrarch’s ‘fresh language,’ Juster has modernized the diction and style in ways that might initially seem objectionable or even shocking. Words such as scumbag, bastard, mobster, sleazy, snotty, lowlife guy, trumped-up, pooh-poohing, and many others are indeed foreign to the tonal qualities of the Canzoniere, and introduce a lower register that is jarring to the reader familiar with the original. However, their cumulative effect is one of Shlovskyan ostranenie: if the Petrarchan idiom has become an ‘illegible’ cliché, an ‘automatism of perception’ in Shlovsky’s terms, then by making it strange and surprising, Juster succeeds in defamiliarizing it in furtherance of a ‘deautomatized perception.’ By introducing un-Petrarchan, or even what might be considered anti-Petrarchan elements, Juster frees Petrarch’s poetry from centuries of accumulated imitation and cliché. Thus, despite his stated aim of remaining ‘faithful’ to the text, it is precisely by not being faithful to the tonal qualities of Petrarch’s language that Juster is able to communicate a sense of its freshness—traduttore-traditore, indeed.
While the translation itself is impressive, the end notes are often disappointing. They do provide useful information for the general reader about historical, geographical and mythological references, as well as about the forms of the poems, but at times they can be confused, and for the reader without adequate knowledge of Italian, extremely misleading. For example, commenting on the word ‘inscribed’ in 120.10, Juster claims that ‘[f]or limitar as “there was inscribed,” one must look to a secondary sense of the Late Latin limitare rather than modern Italian.’ Yet the word limitar here does not correspond to ‘there was inscribed,’ which instead translates the word scripto from the previous line; rather, limitare (the form without apocope) is a noun meaning ‘threshold’ or ‘doorstep,’ in both modern and fourteenth-century Italian, and Juster has correctly translated the phrase di sopra ’l limitar as ‘above the entranceway.’ While it is true that the Canzoniere contains numerous Latinisms of various sorts, there is simply no need for Juster to invoke a special, secondary Late Latin meaning of a word that he has actually translated correctly according to its normal meaning, especially when the translation given in his note does not even refer to the word upon which it purports to be commenting. Perhaps there is an error here, and Juster instead intended to comment on the word scripto, Petrarch’s Latinized spelling of scritto, which is the word that he has actually translated as ‘there was inscribed.’ If this is indeed the case, then there is still no need to have recourse to Latin, as the fourth definition in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, the Italian equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, tells us that the word can mean ‘inscribed upon an object, upon a monument, upon a wall,’ in addition to the more general ‘written.’ This, however, is speculation, since the note is so muddled as to be incomprehensible. Unfortunately, this is not the only instance of confusion in the end notes.
At times the notes give the reader an unflattering view of the thought behind some of Juster’s choices, as what at first seem to be clever and creative interpretations in the manner of Pound or Robert Lowell prove instead to be simple mistakes due to a weak grasp of the language. In the fifth stanza of the canzone Poi che per mio destino (73), Juster translates lines 67-69 as follows: ‘Calm peace without distress of any kind, / like the eternal in celestial sky, / creates a lover’s smile’ (Pace tranquilla senza alcuno affanno, / simile a quella ch’è nel ciel eterna, / move da lor inamorato riso.). In his note on the word ‘creates’ as a translation of the verb move, Juster claims that previous translators have merely ‘plugged in the modern Italian definition of move as “move,” which produces an awkward result,’ a curious claim in that it implies that the word did not mean ‘to move’ in fourteenth-century Italian, which is patently false. He instead has recourse to the Late Latin movere, which can mean ‘produce’ or ‘create.’ However, Juster simply misreads the Italian, for Petrarch writes that pace tranquilla […] move da lor inamorato riso, that is, it moves from their love-inducing smile. The prepositional phrase introduced by da (‘from’) indicates movement from a place, but Juster appears to have read it as the direct object of the verb. The word lor (their) refers back to the occhi soavi of line sixty-three, and riso (smile) refers to the splendor or light of Laura’s eyes, which are often compared to the stars or the sun. The image of the eyes’ smile is also found in Dante’s description of Beatrice in Paradiso XV.34: ché dentro a li occhi suoi ardeva un riso (‘for within her eyes a smile burned/glowed’). The sentence clearly says that calm peace moves from the love-inducing splendor (smile) of Laura’s eyes to the poet-lover’s heart. This trope of the virtù that emanates from the eyes of the beloved woman, penetrates through the eyes of the lover and enters his heart, causing love to be born there, is found in many of Petrarch’s predecessors and contemporaries, as well as elsewhere in the Canzoniere. The appeal to some presumed Late Latin meaning of movere to justify ‘creates’ in this this context is not only superfluous, but also misleading, because it arises from a mistaken reading of the syntactic relations in the sentence.
A related example is found in the first lines of poem ninety-four: ‘When, from deep in my heart and through my eyes, / the lady’s image comes’ (Quando giugne per gli occhi al cor profondo / l’imagin donna). Juster once again misinterprets the syntax, rendering the trope senseless: the image of the lady does not arise from the heart of the lover, as Petrarch does not write dal cor (‘from the heart’), but al cor (‘to the heart’), meaning that the image of the lady comes to his heart, reaching it by means of his eyes. Perhaps the confusion, beyond the clear misreading of the prepositional phrases in these examples, can partly be explained by the misinterpretation, repeated several times in the notes, of this figure as a mere example of the fourteenth-century theory ‘that vision relied on eyes emitting rays.’ The trope, however, is an important one, and Juster’s failure to recognize it, as he repeatedly references a much less relevant optical theory, has perhaps contributed to the careless reading of the syntax in these examples.
However, returning to the word ‘creates’ as a translation of move in 73.69, in spite of the obvious misunderstanding revealed in the note, one finds that Juster’s talent as a translator and his feeling for the religious currents of Petrarch’s verse are such that he in any case renders the verse in an interesting way. In an extension of its primary meaning of ‘to move,’ in fourteenth-century Italian the verb movere could mean ‘create’ with reference to God as the Prime Mover, the ultimate cause that brings everything into existence. The verb ‘creates,’ moreover, picks up on the references to God in this stanza, beginning with the analogy from the previous line: ‘like the eternal in celestial sky’ (simile a quella ch’è nel ciel eterna)—where the peace that emanates from Laura’s eyes is compared to the eternal peace in heaven. This notion is developed further in the following lines’ reference to the Prime Mover who ‘governs’ the spheres of the heavens, that is, causes them to move. Juster’s translation subtly communicates the comparison between Laura’s eyes and God’s power to affect the human soul. One might look to poem nine for further justification of Juster’s translation here, as Petrarch there uses the word ‘create’ to indicate the effect of the emanation of Laura’s eyes upon the lover: cosí costei, ch’è tra le donne un sole, / in me movendo de’ begli occhi i rai / crïa d’amor penseri, atti et parole.
Commenting on the word ‘breeze’ in his translation of 80.7, Juster brings to the reader’s attention the pun on the name Laura and l’aura (‘breeze’), and claims that ‘Petrarch emphasizes the pun by using cui (“to whom”) for the otherwise inanimate breeze.’ This suggests that the relative pronoun cui, like the English ‘whom,’ refers only to persons or animate beings, and that applying it to something ‘otherwise inanimate’ would constitute some sort of special emphasis. While there are contexts in which cui is indeed restricted to persons in the Italian of Petrarch’s time—for instance, when it is used for a direct object—when cui follows a preposition, as it does here (a cui – to whom/to which), it can refer to any noun, singular or plural, animate or inanimate, without distinction, and may be translated with ‘whom’ or ‘which,’ depending upon its antecedent. Oddly enough, Juster elsewhere translates cui following a preposition as ‘which’ without any assumption of emphasis or of an animate antecedent, most curiously in 133.14, where the antecedent is once again the Laura/l’aura pun. In reality, any emphasis found here derives solely from Juster’s decision to translate the expression as ‘to whom’ instead of ‘to which,’ and is not present whatsoever in Petrarch’s Italian.
Further examples could be discussed here at length—such as Juster’s misunderstanding of the correlative-disjunctive use of ‘or...or,’ or his misreading of the first-person plural possessive pronoun in 70.25 and elsewhere—but those given above should convey to the reader a sense of the problems involved in his explanations. The end notes are frustrating because Juster’s dismissive attitude towards other translators and the presumption with which he asserts superior understanding of the text seem to be based on inadequate knowledge of the language, often supported by fallacious claims of special Late Latin meanings for perfectly normal fourteenth-century Italian linguistic phenomena. While the notes dealing with mythological or historical matters are informative and useful for the general reader, it would be advisable for those with little or no Italian to ignore the comments on questions of language. It is unfortunate that the publisher did not employ someone with better knowledge of philology and of the Italian language to review the notes more thoroughly before publication, as this might have spared the reader considerable frustration. None of these criticisms, however, detract from the significant achievement of the translation itself, as in many of these cases Juster’s choices are ingenious, and reveal qualities of Petrarch’s verse that might not otherwise have been transmitted.
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Contini concludes his essay by asking what purpose the Petrarchan project serves—Why Petrarch, then?—and his answer is naturally a historical-philological one: Petrarch’s poetry would become the Platonic ideal of the lyric by the sixteenth century, spreading throughout Europe, into French, Spanish and English poetry, and contributing to the birth of modern European poetry. Contini notes the uncanny ability of Petrarch’s poetry to anticipate later developments, for, in spite of its earliness, when it is rediscovered by later poets, it often seems incredibly modern and ahead of its time. The Petrarchan vein resurfaces in Giacomo Leopardi, in a ‘rebirth’ that is ‘virginally fresh’ and ‘still nourishing’ after centuries, which is to say that it is not merely a historical artifact, but a force that may, almost suddenly and without forewarning, generate new poetic developments. Petrarch’s poetry emerged after roughly a century of intense experimentation and unbelievably fecund production in Italian poetry, and he was positioned historically to take advantage of the achievements of that century. In our own time and language, also after roughly a century of experimentation and fertile production in Anglophone literature, we are no longer at the same conjuncture as Pound, and as a result we are perhaps better situated to appreciate Petrarch’s achievement, or more in need of it, and the increasing attention that translators have devoted to the Canzoniere in the twenty-first century testifies to that. The Petrarchan experiment may serve as a model for moving beyond what some might perceive to be the cultural impasse in our own time—not necessarily as regards its precise language, style or formal and ideological concerns, but rather in its astonishing newness, in the depth and dexterity of its treatment of intellectual, emotional and spiritual themes, and in the manner in which it synthesizes a wide range of predecessors, while anticipating subsequent developments. If Contini is correct in asserting the nourishing, generative power of Petrarch’s work to make itself new in the hands of the poet attentive to the richness and subtlety of its art, then Juster’s translation, by giving the reader of English more of that art than any translator has previously, and therefore allowing that reader to experience, in English, some measure of how Petrarch’s poetry works as poetry, contributes significantly to the possibility of such rebirth.
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Eric T. Racher lives in Riga, Latvia. His work has appeared in Exacting Clam, Literary Imagination, Hobart, Nimrod, ballast, and elsewhere. His first book, a sequence of sonnets titled Glosses and Ligatures, will be published by Sagging Meniscus Press in October, 2027.