Italian Poetry

Today we read D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare, by Isabella di Morra.

Picture it: you are a young, smart girl who adores her father because, among other things, he gives you a literary education. Which is not at all to be taken as a given when you live in the early 1500s.

You are surrounded by unruly and frankly nasty brothers, who envy your father’s attentions for you.

Then you father runs afoul of the powers that be, and has to flee to Paris. You are left alone with your brothers, who confine you by the early age of ten to live inside your castle, perched atop a steep cliff. Your life is reduced to writing poetry for yourself, hating the place of your imprisonment, and longing for your father’s return.

This is what the sonnet describes: Isabella looking out to the sea from her lonely, hated cliff, searching the horizon for ships that might bring her, if not her father, at least news of him.

But her father never came home, even after his pardon: he preferred to climb the ranks at the court in Paris, and abandoned his family back in the sticks.

This veritable Rapunzel had her one little joy in the literary correspondence she maintained with another poet, Diego Sandoval, a neighbouring noble. Their letters had to be sneaked in by her tutor, to avoid suspicions. But of course their brothers got wind of them, immediately suspected a tryst, and thought nothing of killing her to restore the “family honour.”

Such was the short, unhappy life of Isabella.

The original:

Today we read Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono, by Francesco Petrarca.

I am a happy subscriber to the Poem of the Day newsletter from the Poetry Foundation, and a few weeks ago I received in my mailbox this version of the opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.

Though I’m of course glad to see Italian authors showcased, and even setting aside my general misgivings about translating poetry, I must admit I would definitely not call this a “translation” from the Italian: perhaps a rather free reinterpretation?

And so, given a severe delay in providing some Petrarca on these pages, here we go.

As mentioned, this is the first sonnet of the collection that cemented Petrarch’s reputation for the ages: the Canzoniere, which means “collection of songs.” As it was the case for the opening sonnet of Boccaccio’s collection, it is a declaration of poetics. But it can also be seen as the capstone of the collection, because it recapitulates the journey of the poet, from the total absorption in his love for Laura, to the later recognition of it as a shameful error, and the very religious turn of the later poems.

What I can’t help but always find striking is how, in describing this “youthful error” of his, he inject in this very poem, so prominent, an obviously-deliberate syntax error. The first two quatrains are a long sentence building up on that Voi, “you who listen,” that one expects to be the subject. And yet, once verse eight arrives, the sentence breaks down, Petrarca becomes the subject asking for forgiveness, and if he asks it of them, at least one preposition is missing all the way back in verse one.

For the master sonnettier, synonymous of formal perfection, and founder of a tradition lasting more than 600 years, it feels like quite a statement.

The original:

Today we read Presagio, by Ada Negri.

Ana Negri was known for her interest in social reform, and her early poetry reflects that, later morphing into patriotism after the experience of the First World War.

This poem was written at a later stage of her life, when she was sixty, and attests to her shift towards more intimate and lyrical themes, lingering on memory.

Here she describes the end of winter, the first glimpses of spring, and likens this liminal moment to the awakening of adolescence in a young woman’s life. The longing for, and anticipation of, the fullness of love; and the warning that when it does arrive, it might not be all that one expected it to be.

The original:

Today we read Mio padre è stato per me l’“assassino”, by Umberto Saba.

Saba’s mother was abandoned by the poet’s father while still pregnant. Understandably she didn’t harbour good memories of him, but went as far as referring to him as “the assassin” when talking to Umberto all through his childhood.

In this sonnet Saba recounts meeting his father later on, when he was twenty. He is presented not with a killer or a mastermind, but with a child, drifting without cares through his life and the world (and his many lovers).

The poet contrasts his mother, who felt all the heaviness of life, with his father’s attitude, his slipping from her hands like a balloon, light and ethereal: not a bad person, really — simply unable to keep his responsibilities.

The original:

Today we read Trasformazione di Dafne in lauro, by Giambattista Marino.

In the full glory of baroque flourishes, Marino presents here the notorious rape of Daphne by Apollo. And the poem, though offset by the beauty of the language and technique, is brutal.

The first quatrain focuses on Daphne, shown in distress, running away, looking for her father, likened to a hunted-down doe. Still, slowly but surely, as she turns into a tree as the last resort to escape from the god, the poet’s sympathy also seems to recede. As if saying: she’s just an object now.

And so in the last terzina there is almost no trace of her left. There’s only the triumph of the god: he might have not gotten her fruit, but he will forever adorn his head with the branches of the laurel: her branches. Violence and god’s will prevail in the end, of course.

The original:

Today we read Sia pace ai frati, by Vittorio Alfieri.

This short and punchy epigram by Vittorio Alfieri embodies the Enlightenment attitude towards religion and state: peaceful coexistence in separate domains.

Priests should be few and not overly loquacious in the public arena; cardinals should not take away the lights (here Alfieri uses the term “lume”, and “età dei lumi” is an expression for “Enlightenment”).

The pope should concentrate on the problems of faith and salvation, leaving politics to politicians.

Laws should rule, not a king.

And the concluding line exclaims patriotically: there is an Italy!

The original:

Today we read Il lampo, by Giovanni Pascoli.

In this very short ballad Pascoli paints an impressionistic picture of the moment right before the start of a torrential storm, at night. Everything is black and silent, but suddenly a flash of lightning lights up the landscape, and reveals a sky about to burst into rain, and the ground heaving as if waiting for the outpour.

A house also appears briefly, only to be swallowed up by darkness soon after.

But this is not just a description of a natural phenomenon, and the last lines are a hint to the second meaning of the poem.

The house is compared to an eye that opens, wide and shocked, and closes back into the night. The whole thing is a symbolic reference to the death of Pascoli’s father, who was shot one evening while returning home. The lightning, then, is also the flash from the shotgun the brigands used to kill him.

The original:

Today we read Bella ch’invecchia, by Anton Giulio Brignole Sale.

This short epigram was composed by a member of the elite of the Republic of Genoa, when it was at the apex of its commercial and banking power in Europe. Part of his surname, Brignole, is well-known to all the travellers that today stop at, or pass by, the second most important station of the city.

But nothing grandiose here. Just a witty play on the usual, trite trope of love poetry: love enters from the eyes.

The poet is consoling a beautiful woman distressed by the passage of time. He explains to her that to love you need to see first. And just as the Sun is too bright to be seen during the day, but easier to behold when it is setting; people will be able to see her more and more, and thus love her the better for it.

The original:

Today we read Chi sono, by Aldo Palazzeschi.

The modern departure from the themes and connotations of classical poetry can be done in several way: in anger, or with a strong condemnation of the past, or touting the moral superiority of the new way of doing things, for example.

In the case of Palazzeschi, the approach is through irony, levity and a sense of humour that suffuses most of his poems. In what is perhaps his most famous work, after all, he concludes a series of frankly silly verses by saying “oh just let me have some fun!”

In today’s poem Palazzeschi asks “who am I?”, and investigates his work as an artist. He starts by comparing himself to the usual, established figures valued by “high brow” culture: a poet? a painter? a musician? But no: his pen can only write one word: foolishness; his palette has only one color, melancholy.

Turns out he is just a street performer, drawing people’s attention to his own soul. He uses the word saltimbanco: a lowly job aimed at popular entertainment, and that is often used with the connotation of a charlatan.

The original:

Today we read Paolo e Francesca, by Dante Alighieri.

I can’t delay anymore: it’s time for some Dante, and in particular for some Comedy (the adjective divina, or “Divine,” is a later attribution).

This work is very different from anything I have presented so far: it is a long poem, divided in three books (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), each consisting of 33 canti (though Inferno has an additional canto as prologue, bringing the total to one hundred), written in a sequence of tercets linked by rhymes, so that the narrative flows in a uninterrupted formal continuum typical of the terza-rima.

It is the masterpiece of early Italian poetry, though it is probably more studied and admired than imitated, given the sheer range of its linguistic registers and themes, and its “cosmic” scope. Still, it shaped the medieval and modern imagination about the afterlife.

During his visit of hell, Dante discovers that it is organized in nine concentric rings, each dedicated to sinners marked by increasingly grave sins, each ring being narrower and deeper inside the Earth. At the bottom/center, Satan himself is bound.

In this extract from canto V, Dante is visiting the first area of hell proper, where the souls are marred by the least grievous sin, lust. These souls are punished according to the usual rule of contrappasso: just like, while alive, they were not able to control themselves and gave in to their carnal desires, now they are continuously buffeted along by a strong wind that never lets them rest.

Among these souls, Dante sees two that are together, and paion sì al vento esser leggieri (they seem light on the winds), decides to talk to them, calls them, and they approach not unlike doves.

Our long extract starts now. First one of the souls, Francesca, speaks, and in three lovely tercets, each starting with the word “love,” briefly summarizes their fate: they fell in love, and because of that they died, or rather were killed.

Dante is struck by this, and remains thoughtful for a while. It is easy to imagine him, a poet in the rich tradition of courtly love who then sang of love as a means to reach god, to have conflicting feelings for this couple whose only sin was to love.

So he asks them, how did you fall in love? Francesca then recounts how she and her beloved Paolo (who always remains silent and whose name is not given in the poem) were reading, together and unsuspecting, a book on the story of Lancelot and his love for Guinevere.

Often, while reading, they would look each other in the eye. But when they arrived at the part in which Lancelot finally kisses Guinevere, Paolo, trembling, kissed Francesca — and, she says, “that day we didn’t read anymore.”

Dante is so distressed by this story that he faints and falls down, “like a dead body falls.”

The original: