Italian Poetry

Today we read Era ’l giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro, by Girolamo Malipiero.

The influence of Petrarch on Italian poetry can only be understated, and yet it still surprising sometimes to see the lengths to which some later poets went in their dialogue with him.

In the early 1500s a Venetian friar, Girolamo Malipiero, decided that his poetic master had been in error to dedicate so much of his art to sing his secular love, and took it upon himself to turn Petrarch’s sonnets into a more proper, religious form. The process entailed taking a sonnet from the Canzoniere, keeping one or a few verses unchanged (typically the first), keeping also all the rhyme words, but then rewrite the rest as a devotional poem.

It is unfortunate that I haven’t prepared yet a page for the original of the sonnet I’m presenting now, but it can be read here.

In the original, Petrarch describes his fateful first encounter with Laura, when he fell in love with her and the story told in his Canzoniere started. He sees her, and his defenses against Love are down, so Love binds him in a net of sorrows to come.

Both sonnets start with the same two lines, describing how the meeting happened “when the sun lost his light because of its pain for his maker” — a roundabout way to refer to the Passion of Christ. It was Good Friday, April 6, 1327.

What for Petrarch was the start of a secular love story, in Malipiero becomes the religious conversion: looking at Jesus on the Cross, he becomes prisoner of the Greatest Love.

The original:

Today we read Tutti in maschera, by Emilio Praga.

It might come as a surprise that the author of the sonnet about God’s implied approval and forgiveness of free love that we have previously published would also write religious poetry.

And yet here we are. Praga vehemently reprimands those who complain that God doesn’t show himself directly: do they expect to be able to see him naked, as if he were a prostitute who can be bought for a few coins?

Besides, men also hide behind a mask, never showing their true face. Instead of wanting God to be more forthcoming than us, we should be grateful that he allows us our masks: how horrible would it be to see what’s behind…

The poem is written in settenari, alternatingly with eight (sdruccioli) and seven (piani) syllables. The piani ones rhyme two by two.

The original:

Today we read Per lei, by Giorgio Caproni.

Giorgio Caproni’s mother, Anna (or rather Annina, as he fondly calls her), died in 1950, when he was 38. The collection “Il seme del piangere” (The seed of crying), published nine years later, is not only dedicated to her, but puts her at the center as a protagonist.

This poem is both a reflection on Anna’s personality, and a declaration of poetics: his mother was straightforward, honest, clear, simple, and so, in describing her, he wants to use simple language, straightforward rhymes, open sounds.

The resulting composition is technically masterful and at the same time refreshingly light and musical.

The original:

Today we read Care selve, a voi ritorno, by Apostolo Zeno.

The heroine of the last story of Boccaccio’s Decameron (and of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale) is put through quite the ordeal. Her husband, in order to test her, first asks her to give up their two children so they can be put to death. Then, even though she complied, she is told that he obtained Papal dispensation to divorce her, and is sent away.

This libretto by poet Apostolo Zeno recounts that same tale, and became a huge success at the time. It was put to music by several high-profile composers, among which Albinoni, Scarlatti and Vivaldi.

In this brief extract, the exiled Griselda has arrived to her father’s place. She looks at the familiar surroundings, noting that nothing seems changed, and yet she is different, because of her love for her husband. It blossomed right there, and the memories threaten to overwhelm her.

I particularly enjoy here the transition from the regular, simple and lulling pattern of the ottonari in the aria to the more complex, discursive and expressive rhythm of the recitativo.

The original:

Today we read Funere mersit acerbo, by Giosuè Carducci.

Carducci’s brother, Dante, committed suicide in 1857 — although some say he was actually killed by their father during a particularly violent fight.

When his son was born, some twenty years later, the poet called him Dante, certainly in memory of his uncle, but likely also as an homage to the divin poeta, Dante Alighieri.

This sonnet was written in 1970, a few months after the death of his son at the age of three. Carducci asks his brother, who is sleeping on a hill beside their father, if he heard a cry. It was his son, he says, who is now knocking on his uncle’s door, joining him in the cold world of the dead.

His request is to welcome him and guide him. He is, after all, only a boy, who was just now playing in the garden, and must surely be looking around for the light of the sun, and for his mother.

The title of the poem is not Italian, but Latin. It’s a chilling quote from Virgil, when he describes Aeneas’s descent to the Underworld, and his meeting with the souls of dead young children stolen from their mothers’ breasts.

A more dramatic reading of this poem by noted actor Arnoldo Foà is available on YouTube.

The original:

Today we read Didone abbandonata, by Pietro Metastasio.

In perhaps the most famous episode of the Aeneid, the titular hero and his companions, stranded, are rescued by Dido. She falls in love with Aeneas, who reciprocates but subsequently abandons her in order to fulfill his destiny and eventually found Rome.

There are plenty of musical renditions of the episode. This brief extract is from Metastasio’s first ever opera, and shows us a grieving Aeneas, in love with the queen but at the same time feeling he is letting down his companions by remaining in Carthage. Damned if he stays, and damn if he leaves.

Or, as Jimmy Durante put it, quoted in the immortal Meet Joe Black,

Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go,

The original:

Today we read Sdegna Clorinda a i femminili uffici, by Petronilla Paolini Massimi.

This sonnet belongs to the long tradition of poems by outspoken women that have no qualms in claiming their complete equality with men.

The first quatrain is dedicated to Clorinda, a heroine-warrior in the super-famous poem La Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso.

The second extols the intellectual prowess of Amalasonta, the daughter of Theodoric.

Her conclusion is clear: since Nature gives women the same abilities that it gives to men, it is men that deny women their due.

One cannot blame Petronilla for the strength of her denunciation: she lived a very unhappy life. Married off at the appalling age of ten to the instigator of the killer of her father, she was forced to live in Castel Sant’Angelo, literally a prison at the time, while all she wanted was to study literature and philosophy in a convent.

The original:

Today we read Sventatezza, by Antonia Pozzi.

War would seem to be mentioned only offhand in this bittersweet poem about a daughter’s memory of a hike with her father, when she was still a young child.

But the two landmarks evoked here, the Montello Hill and the Piave River, were the setting of some of the worst fighting endured by Italy during War World I.

Her father is telling her about it from a “nook” in the ground (that is, a trench), where the grass is sharp, and the roots are still drinking drops of blood.

But the little girl is impatient, her legs are restless, itching for a run. All she wants to do is sprint out and gather some blackberries, carefree.

The original:

Today we read Eri dritta e felice, by Leonardo Sinisgalli.

In general I prefer poems that have a clear metrical structure, but sometimes one comes along that will catch my attention even without. Such is the case with these verses by Leonardo Sinisgalli.

The poem opens with the verb “to be”, in the past tense. This is a poem of memory. Of childhood, as we learn later, or at least one assumes so, because the poet and his female friend are portrayed walking around the fields barefoot.

So, in the past, she was straight and happy, standing at the threashold of a house that didn’t restrain her, but was rather the starting point for their adventures together, in a landscape of sun and light.

This probably means that she is not straight now, but bent; and that it’s not summer (the season of wasps) anymore. But the memory is still blinding with light.

The ending of the poem, though without rhymes, is all a play of assonances and consonances and similar devices (midolla/allora, fossi/sassi, ardore/sole).

It is also striking how the poem manages to be both intimate and detached: the author uses the impersonal si (“one”) instead of “we”, as if he was observing her from afar.

The original:

Today we read Sogni e favole io fingo e pure in carte, by Pietro Metastasio.

We are told that while writing an aria for his opera L’Olimpiade, Metastasio was so moved by what he himself had written that, apparently, he started crying.

After such a display of emotion caused by pure fiction, and his fiction at that, he felt silly, and not a little impious. This sonnet was his way to put things in perspective.

The original: