"Petrarch's Canzoniere is a body of 366 poems, mostly sonnets but including forms such as madrigals and canzoni. These wonderful poems marked the intellectual and cultural divide between the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Cook's translation, a splendid poetic work in its own right, ""elegantly combining grace and accuracy... ranks among the best."" (K.V. Gouwens, UC-Santa Barbara). The translation, says Konrad Eisenbichler, ""captures the moods, tones, and variety of Petrarch's own verse. A truly remarkable feat."" Cook addresses the deceptive simplicity of Petrarch's vocabulary, the work's cultural context rendered here as broadly modern rather than facilely archaic, and the elegance of his poetic diction. The Italian text (ed. Gianfranco Contini) is printed on facing pages."
Ineffable sweetness, bold, uncanny sweetness that came to my eyes from her lovely face; from that day on I'd willingly have closed them, never to gaze again at lesser beauties. --from Sonnet 116 Petrarch was born in Tuscany and grew up in the south of France. He lived his life in the service of the church, traveled widely, and during his lifetime was a revered, model man of letters. Petrarch's greatest gift to posterity was his Rime in vita e morta di Madonna Laura, the cycle of poems popularly known as his songbook. By turns full of wit, languor, and fawning, endlessly inventive, in a tightly composed yet ornate form they record their speaker's unrequited obsession with the woman named Laura. In the centuries after it was designed, the "Petrarchan sonnet," as it would be known, inspired the greatest love poets of the English language--from the times of Spenser and Shakespeare to our own. David Young's fresh, idiomatic version of Petrarch's poetry is the most readable and approachable that we have. In his skillful hands, Petrarch almost sounds like a poet out of our own tradition bringing the wheel of influence full circle.
Franceso Petrarch (1304-1374), creator of the sonnet form, remained for more than three hundred years the most influential poet in Europe, his works more widely read than even those of Dante. This collection contains English language versions of his poems from across six centuries, in a wide variety of translations and reinterpretations. Spanning the Trionfi series and the Canzoniere - Petrarch's empassioned sonnet-sequence concerning his beloved Laura - it also includes great English poems influenced by Petrarch. From Chaucer's early adaptation of a Petrarchan sonnet in Troilus and Criseyde to the sixteenth century translations by the Earl of Surrey, Byron's mocking consideration of the Canzoniere in Don Juan and Ezra Pound's parody Silet, all provide a unique insight into the significance of the founder of the European lyric tradition.
Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) has been described as the 'first modern man of letters' and his influence on the European lyric tradition has been widespread. The poems of his Canzoniere, closely associated as they are with the enigmatic figure of Laura, were soon to become the models for love-poetry in nearly all major European literatures in the Renaissance. The new translations here use the same rhyme schemes and broadly the same metres as those used by Petrarch himself. The facing English texts are thus not intended to be absolutely literal, but to reflect the inner meanings and moods of the originals, with some further literal translations of difficult passages added in the notes. The notes to the poems also cover their likely dates, mythological allusions, certain background settings, and a number of other calendrical and structural features which appear to emerge from the actual sequencing of the collection itself. There is also a section on old Italian syntax. and other linguistic aids. The new translation of Petrarch's Rerum Vulgarian Fragmenta is in two separate volumes.
"Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity and biblical intertextuality, this study argues that Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is an ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures. The author begins with the premise that the multiple voices of the Petrarchan figure (or subject) call for a reading informed by historical and autobiographical considerations. Within such a reading, the internal chronology of the work coincides with a temporal framework provided by Petrarch's Latin prose and poetry. Drawing on this material, he argues that Petrarch's derivations from early poets in the Italian vernacular, his Augustineanism and his humanism are manifest in the Fragmenta and contribute to its narrative and theological unity."--
Petrarch was the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive literary Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and Greco-Roman culture in general. My Secret Book reveals a remarkable self-awareness as he probes and evaluates the springs of his own morally dubious addictions to fame and love.
How medieval songbooks were composed in collaboration with the community—and across languages and societies: “Eloquent…clearly argued.”—Times Literary Supplement Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received—a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies. The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category poetry: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks—in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists—contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook’s role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.
