CANZONIERE
Selected Poems
FRANCESCO PETRARCA (PETRARCH), the son of an exiled Florentine notary, was born in 1304 in Arezzo. In 1312 he went with his father to Avignon, then the seat of the papal court, and in nearby Carpentras began a traditional training in rhetoric. After further education in law at Montpellier and Bologna, he was recalled by his father’s death to Avignon. There, on 6 April 1327, he first saw Laura who inspired the passion commemorated in the Canzoniere, the poetic sequence that future generations throughout Europe were to revere as the great model for love poetry. After some years in the service of Cardinal Colonna, a powerful and enlightened patron, and after travel in France, Germany and Flanders, Petrarch withdrew to Vaucluse (Provence) where he began the Latin epic Africa and the Triumphs. The fame of his learning and poetry grew rapidly and in 1341, on Easter Sunday, he was crowned poet laureate at the Capitol in Rome. In 1353, after the deaths of Laura and Cardinal Colonna, Petrarch left Avignon in disgust at the corruption of the papal court. Welcomed by the Visconti in Milan, he performed a number of diplomatic missions in Europe before moving on to Venice and finally to Padua. In his last years he completed the Triumphs and reordered and revised the poems of the Canzoniere. He died in July 1374.
ANTHONY MORTIMER has taught at universities in Italy, Germany and the United States and has been Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva. He now holds the chair of English Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance (Milan, 1975) and Variable Passions: A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ (New York, 2000) and editor of The Authentic Cadence: Centennial Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins (Fribourg, 1992). His verse translations from Italian and German have appeared in a variety of periodicals and he has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, including Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson and Herbert, and on Anglo-Italian literary relations.
SELECTED POEMS
Translated
with an Introduction and Notes by
ANTHONY MORTIMER
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This translation first published in Penguin Classics
2002
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Copyright © Anthony Mortimer, 2002
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ISBN: 978-0-14-193544-7
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Note on the Text
Canzoniere
PART ONE
PART TWO
Notes
Index of Italian First Lines
Index of English First Lines
Among the many people who have given me help and encouragement, I should particularly like to thank Sarah DeVenne, Hugh Amory, Andrew Joscelyne, Penny McCarthy, Edoardo Fumagalli and Guglielmo Gorni. Rosanna Masiola Rosini provided me with kindly critical audiences in places as far apart as Perugia and Oregon, and the editors of Forum Italicum allowed me to test early versions on their readers. Richard Waswo insisted that English be kept up and was generous with characteristically incisive examples of how it might be done. My oldest debt is to the girl in the white raincoat who taught me Italian, my most recent is to Martin Dodsworth whose kindness, quite simply, made this book possible.
A. M.
September 2001
1304–11 Arezzo, 20 July 1304, birth of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), son of notary Petracco, Florentine political exile.
1312–26 Father moves to Avignon, seat of the Papal Court, but mother and children settle in nearby Carpentras where Petrarch’s education begins under Convenevole da Prato. Studies law, first at Montpellier and then at Bologna (1320–26). Purchases Augustine’s City of God (1325). Abandons law on death of father.
1327–32 On 6 April 1327, in church of St Clare, Avignon, falls in love with Laura. First vernacular love poems. In 1330 stays with Giacomo Colonna, Bishop of Lombez in the Pyrenees. Enters service of Giacomo’s brother, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. Is never ordained priest, but probably receives minor orders.
1333–6 Journey to Paris, Low Countries, Rhineland. In Liège discovers Cicero’s Pro Archia. On return to Avignon receives much-cherished copy of Augustine’s Confessions. Urges Pope Benedict: XII to restore papacy to Rome. Climbs Mont Ventoux (1336).
1337–41 Birth of illegitimate son Giovanni (1337). After visit to Rome, withdraws to Vaucluse (Provence) where he begins De viris illustribus (On famous men), the Latin epic Africa, and possibly the Triumphs. Offered laurel crown by both Paris and Rome. Travels to Rome and is crowned in the Capitol (8 April 1341).
1342–5 Stays at Selvapiana near Parma, working on De viris and Africa. Back in Vaucluse begins study of Greek, but never achieves proficiency. Collects about a hundred poems for first version of Canzoniere. Birth of illegitimate daughter Francesca (1343). Brother Gherardo becomes Carthusian monk. Unsuccessful diplomatic mission to Naples. Adventurous escape from Parma under siege. In Verona discovers Cicero’s letters to Atticus.
1346–53 At Vaucluse. Writes the pastoral poem Bucolicum carmen and De vita solitaria (The solitary life). Begins Secretum (1347). Sets out for Rome with enthusiasm for the revolution of Cola di Rienzo, but is discouraged by news of Cola’s excesses. News of Laura’s death reaches him at Parma (1348). Death of Cardinal Colonna. Writes Penitential Psalms and works on Triumph of Death. Begins collection of letters (Familiares). Stays with Boccaccio in Florence, the first of many meetings. Visits Rome for Jubilee (1350). Returns to Vaucluse, then settles in Milan as guest of the Visconti. Reproached by Boccaccio for serving a tyrant.
1354–62 Cola di Rienzo killed by Roman mob (1354). Diplomatic missions to Venice (1354), Prague (1356), Paris (1361). New form of Canzoniere contains 170 poems (1358). Latin prose works include De remediis utriusque fortune (Remedies against both kinds of fortune), Seniles (Letters in Old Age) and polemics of various kinds. Completes Chigi version of Canzoniere with 215 poems (1361). Death of son Giovanni. Leaves Milan for Venice.
1363–7 Divides time between Venice, Pavia and Padua. Employs copyist Giovanni Malpaghini who completes transcription of Familiares and begins that of Canzoniere (1366). Writes De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On his own ignorance and that of many others) in reply to personal attack by young Averroist philosophers (1367).
1368–74 Moves to Padua and then to new house at nearby Arquà where he lives with daughter Francesca. Makes Latin translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda from the Decameron. Autobiographical Letter to Posterity. Last trip to Venice for peace treaty between Venice and Padua (1373). Last work on Triumphs. Final touches to manuscript of Canzoniere. Dies at Arquà during night of 18–19 July 1374.
The life of Petrarch is a story of uninterrupted success. He was born in 1304, the son of an exiled Florentine notary who, at the papal court in Avignon, acquired enough wealth to give his son a solid grounding first in rhetoric with a private tutor and then in law at the universities of Montpellier and Bologna. Before the age of thirty Petrarch had achieved financial independence by entering the service of an enlightened patron, Cardinal Colonna, who granted him every possible facility for study, travel and literary composition. As a minor ecclesiastic, with no pretension to a priestly vocation, he accumulated the canonries and chaplaincies that were the age’s equivalent to generous subsidies. He was not yet forty when he was crowned poet laureate at the Capitol in Rome. For the rest of a life that was long by medieval standards he was an unquestioned celebrity, sought after by princes and admired as the archetypal man of letters, not only in Italy but throughout Europe. Chaucer’s tribute, written a few years after Petrarch’s death in 1374, speaks for a whole generation:
Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete,
Highte this clerk, whos rethorike sweete
Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie.1
The Petrarch who was so revered is not, however, the one that most modern readers know. The vernacular lyrics of the Canzoniere may have assured his posthumous fame, but they were not what established his reputation in his lifetime. A glance at the first complete edition of Petrarch (Basel, 1554) reveals that his work in Italian occupies only eighty pages as opposed to a massive 1,370 in Latin, and it is this Latin Petrarch that we must consider if we want to understand the full force of his personality, the scope of his learning and the nature of his relation to his own age.
Despite the inclusion of some impressive commendatory and patriotic poems, the Canzoniere gives the overall impression of an intense but narrow focus, the work of a man so intent on feeling his own pulse that he is scarcely aware of the throbbing life around him. The Latin works present a very different picture. There are, to be sure, some major texts in praise of the solitary or contemplative life and there is that masterly examination of conscience, the Secretum (My secret), but we also find a writer committed to such public genres as the epic poem, the lives of famous men or the political allegory. This is the same Petrarch who urges the Pope to restore the papacy to Rome, who corresponds with the Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo and who is employed by Italy’s factious lords on a variety of diplomatic missions. It is evidence of Petrarch’s robust constitution and capacity for self-discipline that, with all this, he still finds time to be the scholar who debates with Boccaccio, who discovers lost texts of Cicero, who glimpses the importance of Greek and who has so often been regarded as the founding father of Renaissance humanism. The almost six hundred Latin letters show the vast range of his concerns: philosophy, history, geography, medicine, astrology (of which he disapproves), education, gardening or just the way to set up a good dinner party. There seems to be nothing that he cannot write about with a well-informed interest. In no area can he be called an original thinker, but the mind is extraordinarily well-stocked and nobody else in Italy or Europe brings together so many strands of the period’s intellectual life.
The letters also testify to one of Petrarch’s most attractive qualities, his capacity for deep and lasting friendship. To Guido Sette, Philippe de Cabassoles, Giacomo Colonna, Boccaccio or the friends he calls Laelius and Socrates Petrarch writes with liveliness, warmth and an unfailing concern for their welfare. If the Canzoniere presents an introvert whose life is given over to a single passion, the Latin letters reveal a basically convivial man whose heart had room for more than one affection and who always found his affection abundantly returned.
Seen in the light of such a successful career, the vein of melancholy that finds expression in the Canzoniere may appear as a self-indulgent literary pose. There are, however, a number of reasons why Petrarch’s celebrity failed to give him the satisfaction we might expect. The one that emerges most strongly from his autobiographical writings is the combination of an exorbitant desire for fame with a profoundly religious temperament that made him feel guilty about its achievement. Another is that much of his reputation depended on ambitious projects that, in fact, he failed to complete, works such as the epic Africa or the historical De viris illustribus (On famous men). For all his attempts at humility, Petrarch had a very high opinion of his talents and he failed to live up to his own expectations. Finally, there is his rootlessness. The poet who writes so eloquently of rural tranquillity is a man who cannot settle. Petrarch is a permanent exile. Vaucluse was beautiful, but too near the corruption of Avignon; he had no reason to love the Florence that had exiled his father; Rome had given him the laurel crown, but the absence of the papacy and the failure of Cola di Rienzo made it a monument to the age’s decay; Milan, Venice and Padua might offer him protection, but they were all embroiled in the petty wars that disgraced the peninsula. Petrarch was proud to be an Italian, but Italy did not exist. What could exist was an Italian language and Petrarch writes it with the scrupulous tact, grace and precision of someone for whom it is not an instinctive idiom, but a conscious literary choice. The Italian of Petrarch’s poetry remains the language of a lost or imagined homeland, as rarefied in its way as the Laura it was devised to praise.
The collection of poems that we now call the Canzoniere was known to Petrarch himself as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments in the vulgar tongue), and there is more to this deprecatory title than modesty, genuine or affected. It serves to remind us of the origin of the collection in ‘scattered rhymes’ (Canzoniere 1) which would only gradually acquire the kind of cohesion that makes the Canzoniere a model for the Renaissance sonnet-sequence and the not-too-distant ancestor of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609).2
The poems of the Canzoniere were written over a period of about forty years. Given Petrarch’s meticulous attention to his manuscripts and his assiduity in noting additions and revisions, there is probably no earlier work of literature about whose genesis we know so much. We know, for example, that some poems date from shortly after the meeting with Laura in 1327 and others from as late as 1368, while the final text is the result of a transcription and reordering that went on until the year of the poet’s death (1374). We shall not concern ourselves here with all the stages that scholars have been able to distinguish in this lengthy process; but we do need to look at the nature and timing of the poet’s seminal decision to turn a notebook of relatively autonomous lyric poems into the coherent confessional sequence whose basic outline is best given in the words that Petrarch himself inscribed in his precious Virgil when he ‘heard the news of Laura’s death.
Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate. The sad tidings reached me in Parma, in the same year, on the morning of the 19th day of May […] I have thought to write this, in bitter memory, yet with a certain bitter sweetness, here in this place that is often before my eyes, so that I may be admonished, by the sight of these words and by the consideration of the swift flight of time, that there is nothing in life in which I should find pleasure, and that it is time, now that the strongest tie is broken, to flee from Babylon; and this, by the prevenient grace of God, should be easy for me, if I meditate deeply and manfully on the futile cares, the empty hopes, and the unforeseen events of my past years.3
The real significance of that inscription lies in the fact that Laura’s name is not, as we might expect, primarily recorded in order to preserve for an admiring posterity the memory of her beauty and of the poet’s love. Famous through Petrarch’s verses she may be, but we are a world removed from the Shakespearean ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’. Here the name of Laura serves, above all, as a memento mori, a reminder of the vanity and transience of desire, a witness to the futility of the past, an abiding warning of the need for conversion.
Tradition has labelled the two parts of the Canzoniere as In vita and In morte, thus perpetuating the legend that makes the death of Laura the turning point in Petrarch’s career. These labels, however, have no justification in any manuscript and are hard to reconcile with the fact that Laura’s death is not even mentioned in the long examination of conscience (canzone 264) that begins the second part. All the evidence suggests that we should regard the death of Laura as one episode in a long spiritual crisis that probably began as early as 1343 when Petrarch’s brother Gherardo became a Carthusian monk, was reinforced by a growing hatred of the papal court at Avignon and by disappointment at the failure of Cola di Rienzo’s Roman revolution (1347), and culminated at the end of the decade in the deaths of many of his close friends, including his patron Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. The soul-searching of those years finds its most powerful expression in the Secretum, an imaginary Latin dialogue in which St Augustine reproaches ‘Franciscus’ for having wasted his life seeking the illusory happiness promised by his two great passions: desire for literary fame and love for Laura, the ‘two knots’ that still bind him in canzone 264. Franciscus, though obviously on the losing side of the argument, is not quite ready for the change of life urged on him by the saint. Unable to abandon his worldly studies, he does, however, promise ‘I shall be as true to myself as I can, collect the scattered fragments of my soul, and diligently aim at self-possession’.4Rerum vulgarium fragmentaConfessionsSecretumDe viris illustribusAfricaFamiliares)(Epystole)Familiares