“Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.”
The Scholars, W.B. Yeats
Is it sane to write a love poem? In this illiterate age of criminalized desire, the man of passion is suspect; at best, his critics suggest that his eloquence is merely the vessel for some ulterior motive; at worst, the critics will be considerate enough to invoke the aid of mental health authorities. In this time of falling birth rates and flattening irony, dare we treat love as all-consuming passion? As Petrarch did?
Petrarch is an odd man to come to grips with: Comparison to English poets invites only the contemplation of an unhelpful amalgamation, for Petrarch possessed the learning of Milton, the fame of Byron, and the quarrelsomeness of Jonson. At times, he seemed to, paradoxically, desire the anonymous, sanded-down personality of Shakespeare. Even in parts of his character, such as his relationship to religion, Petrarch defies neat analogies: Jonson and Milton come to mind again, as well as Chaucer, but none provide clear parallels to Petrarch. None of those three took minor orders, as Petrarch did. All three married; Petrarch never did (out of a regard for his church position). Milton and Jonson had uneasy relationships with ecclesial authorities; Petrarch navigated church politics just fine. Chaucer, a diplomat, left no written positions on the literary and theological questions of his day. Petrarch is essential for understanding the intellectual controversies of the Renaissance.
So we find, much to our modern chagrin, that neither biography nor psychology provide much insight into Petrarch, even as the man, more than most canonical artists, made his living by trading on both his biography and psyche – besides being a master of the sonnet, Petrarch is credited as a key developer of the modern self.
But this much is clear: Petrarch was a lover. His love sonnets changed the course of literary history. His theme and form were brought over to England by poets like Surrey and Wyatt. Sidney and Spenser further developed the form. Then Shakespeare came.
But many good writers who left deep marks on great writers have disappeared from the desks of readers – who still reads Statius, Dante’s companion through purgatory? Can Petrarch still speak to us today? In a world where readers of the Western Canon find themselves in a position not unlike the defenders of The Alamo – too much space and too few men – ought we to make space in our lives for a defense of Petrarch’s paramountcy?
A.M. Juster has released a new translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, or Songbook, a collection of 366 lyric poems – most of them sonnets. In contrast to previous translations, Juster is committed to the same rhyme schemes and meters that Petrarch used, faithfully reproducing the form which Petrarch mastered and which shaped the poets of England’s literary golden age. Juster does not always provide a word-for-word translation; instead, he focuses on the sentence level. His goal, above all, is to capture the musicality of Petrarch, to make the words on the page sing from our lips.
The result is extraordinary – here is song 87:
“The moment that an arrow leaves its bow,
a skillful archer feels from far away
which shot is hopeless and which he can say
will strike the chosen target with a blow.
You, Lady, felt that look you shot me go
directly through my organs in a way
that meant the wound became the path that day
through which my heart’s eternal tears must flow,
and I am very sure that then you said,
“Sad lover! Where is yearning’s destiny?
Love wants this arrow for the death ahead.”
Since they now see my pain restraining me,
my pair of foes don’t plan to leave me dead;
instead they want to add more misery.”
Here one hears the seminal aspects of the Petrarchan octet. First, the ABBAABBA rhyme scheme which, better than the Shakespearean or Spenserian schemes, mirrors the rhythms of two lovers, for the sound, both distant and claustrophobic, folds back upon itself, as rhymes, forced to meet again, confront whether they can, once again, find novelty in each other’s arms — or exhaust the dance. Here too, though in a more subtle fashion, the octet performs the setting up of a problem to be solved by a volta (or two, in the case of this poem — in his translator’s note, Juster writes that voltas may be a modern imposition; conceding that, this poem nonetheless has two pivot points in the places where modern readers are used to encountering a pivot).
More importantly, this is music that can be sung. Considering Juster’s stated goal, and that few modern translators of Petrarch have aimed for literal, word-for word fidelity, it feels small to point out where Juster differs from the Italian – Petrarch names the Lady’s eyes as arrows, he weeps because of the wound (Juster’s stranger rendering is poetically superior), and he does not number his foes. Juster, throughout this book, by and large succeeds at his sonic aims. Those who want literal translations can readily find those online.
Juster’s rhythms are superb, closer to the metronomic Juster of “Moscow Zoo” than the twisting Juster of “Cuttyhunk, Late Afternoon.” A scansion of Juster’s verse would not look out of place alongside a scansion of Shakespeare’s sonnets – strict iambs most frequently punctured by a first foot trochee, the compression of some words into shorter syllables to fit the decasyllabic count, and the almost religious refusal of feminine endings. Line 13 of song 8, “for he is under someone’s domination,” is one of the few instances I can spot where Juster chooses a feminine ending. And yet, the rhythms here are not those commonly found elsewhere; Juster has an ability to vary light and heavy iambs (in his translator’s note, Juster says he uses spondees) that gives so many of these songs an urgent but supple rhythm.
A reviewer would be remiss, in the days of Emily Wilson, to stay silent on diction and syntax.
“There is no height so daunting overhead
where lust won’t rise to try to take a trip
to shun the one who makes my senses slip
away, and leaves me, like her, stone-cold dead,
so if, to see you, I returned too late
to snub the person wanting me destroyed,
it would not be unfair to pardon me.” (Song 39, lines 5-11)
This sentence is not the minimum wage of Strunk and White, nor the 5x5x5 prose of Graham Greene – five-letter words in five-word sentences in five-sentence paragraphs. Nor is the language baroque; throughout the songs, Juster avoids both the plain and high styles and finds the sweet style.
Some readers may complain about the refusal to use majuscules. Likely every poet in the Renaissance capitalized all their lines. The use of lower-caps gives an indecorous informality — but one that may be the right approach to love poems — the lower caps and long sentences separated by clipped lines creates, at times, the feeling of late-night text messages hastily dashed off.
If there is a real fault to be found in Juster’s translation, it is this: the book lacks bon mots and cutting phrases. One wonders: if these songs were released today and passed off as original inventions, would the language inspire the same frenzy that swept England in the latter half of the sixteenth century? That is to ask the questions posed at the beginning: Does Petrarch still matter, and do poems of passion still enjoy legitimacy?
The case for the former depends entirely on the latter: Petrarch’s prose, the best of which are the Invectives and My Secret Book, is dwarfed by the works of their two models, Cicero and St. Augustine. As a Latin stylist, Petrarch is on par with these men, but the stakes of his rhetorical and spiritual battles are smaller. Petrarch is introspective and learned but not as much as two of his successors: Erasmus and Montaigne. Petrarch’s claim to literary, and not merely historical, interest rests on the Canzoniere, which largely centers on his love for his muse, Laura.
In his introduction, Andrew Frisardi takes Petrarch’s love for Laura – a woman whom the historical record is rather silent about – at face value. He does not believe, as some critics do, that Laura is a composite of multiple women; he also resists portraying Petrarch’s love as stylized or merely literary. He insists on Laura as a real woman and the real basis for Petrarch’s passionate poetry. That leaves the modern reader without exits, forced to walk down the long corridor of Petrarch’s love.
As a writer of love, Petrarch is a victim of his own success. To begin with, he likely wrote too much – the Canzoniere is 366 songs, one for every day of a leap year. This ambition is tolerable – but Petrarch abuses his readers by repeating his themes and motifs ad nauseam. His love is narrow and recursive, not just in narrative but in imagery. Arrows are mentioned 27 times in the songs, the sun 130 times, and eyes 235 times. At a certain point, the arrow strikes, blinding like the sun, and the reader rightly rolls his eyes.
Two men, Shakespeare and Cervantes, took Petrarch’s conventions (at times, reversing them) and folded them into more capacious, more complex works. Their works sustain feminist criticism far better than Petrarch ever will – the silence of Laura unnerves many, particularly those who prefer easy answers to life’s difficult questions.
And, as Sidney likely figured out, when he wove poetry into prose in Arcadia, the novel allows for greater narrative fluidity and more psychological dexterity than the lyric poem. Petrarch’s own sequence is narratively spare, and, as a narration of love, pales in comparison to the great novels.
In that defeat lies Petrarch’s best hope for resurrection. For the lyric has strengths that the novel cannot compass: it defies the safety net of narrative, preferring the high-wire of pure song. There are stories of our lives that defy neat structure and happy articulation, where feelings, having leapt free from the coherent chains of narrative, become the story. These stories were made for lyric cycles.
No one is more primed to preach the scarring incoherence of love than Petrarch. A few more facts, a greater sense of narrative, may give more satisfaction to voyeuristic schoolmarms. But it would not shine light on Petrarch’s love and what that love did to and for him. Petrarch’s poetry remains the record of a soul on fire.
“Her walk was not a mortal’s—more like how
an angel passes—and her voice was one
so far beyond a human melody,
and a celestial soul, a living sun,
was what I saw, and if she’s absent now,
a loosened bow can’t heal the injury.” (Song 90, lines 9-14)
“At times amid a sorrowful lament,
doubt hits me: How can limbs survive at all
when their soul lives as far away as these?
But Love replies to me: “Don’t you recall?
This is the lover’s true entitlement:
release from any human qualities.” (Song 15, lines 9-14)
“I ponder, and self-pity then assails
my thoughts so much it keeps on leading me
to weeping differently,
since, seeing every day the end is near,
I ask God for those wings repeatedly,
so that with them my intellect could sail
out of this mortal jail
and up into the realm of Heaven’s sphere,
and yet, until right now, no sigh, nor tear,
nor prayer has done much good, which fits the bill,
since anybody who can stand up straight,
yet falls along the way, deserves the fate
of lying on the ground against his will.
I see, trustworthy still,
forgiving, open arms; though torn apart
by what some do, my heart
is gripped by fear that rocks my mental state;
someone prods me; and it may be too late.” (Song 264, lines 1-18)
Petrarch’s flame is a broken-hearted love — for Laura and what the world cannot be. His love poetry does not resemble the Song of Songs; his music is closer to the Lamentations, the Psalms, and Job — albeit at a lesser pitch. Frisardi argues that Petrarch’s poems are best thought of as Augustinian struggles of the self: Petrarch, on fire, attempting to remember the right ordering of the cosmos — even as the cosmos does not appear to be rightly ordered. Petrarch’s piety sometimes cuts against him. We speak of Dante’s Inferno but never Petrarch’s, for flames are not the same as infernos. Petrarch is willing to mention Hell, but only when it leads away from Hell. He is not willing to picture himself cast down into a burning lake and loving Christ all the same.
Appreciating the Canzoniere requires a recalibration of expectations. The man who sublimates his feelings into allegory and fantasy rarely garners suspicion – this reviewer has never seen anyone accuse Brandon Sanderson and George R.R. Martin of having hidden designs. The more Christian, historical aspects of fantasy are also safe; new books on King Arthur are greeted by a few with excitement, by most with a shrug. People take it for granted that the fantasy writer is of mean ambition. Escapism is healthy, while the actual romance of our lives is unsanitary. But the escapists are wrong.
There will always be those who object to Petrarch, who wonder how much he can really mean to our world. They, like Yeats’ scholars, prefer to forget their sins, to participate in the soft bigotry of low expectations that renders modern people incapable of being a new Petrarch and Laura. They dominate the discourse, and coincidentally the modern lyric sits impoverished, utterly amputated from its social function. For if love is not sung, then what shall? What Petrarch may mean to our modern world is an open question. But the fault is not his. For Petrarch dared to mean.