Petrarch's Songbook: Rerun Vulgarium Fragmenta.
Montgomery, Robert L.
Perhaps if the study of Italian language, literature, and culture among us were half as current as Italian food and sartorial design, there would be little need for good translations of the great medieval and Renaissance texts. Of course the reality is quite otherwise: Italian is becoming less, not more, familiar, and yet anyone who attempts seriously to inform undergraduate or graduate students of the brilliant tradition of the Western lyric poem or more narrowly of the lyric assembly or collection is bound somehow to try to bring the great achievement of Petrarch into focus. For nearly a generation the main resource has been the prose translation of Robert Durling, or perhaps the selections of Thomas Bergin or Mark Musa. But prose versions or selections, however well done, shrink the original into a presentation of lexical accuracy or draw attention away from the work as a coherent whole.
James Wyatt Cook's verse translation of all 366 poems is therefore a substantial benefit both to students who may wish to find in Petrarch something more than formulas of compliment and amatory pain and to teachers and critics who may wish to gauge how much of the original can be glimpsed through the rhythms, diction, and word order of a different language and a partially different poetic tonality.
The major obstacle to a verse translation is of course the impossibility of any system of rhyming in English to recover that of Italian. Cook has wisely not used rhyme at all. Instead he employs blank verse to contain Petrarch's hendecasyllables for the sonnets and matches the syllabic line for other types of poem. The lack of rhyme saves the translation from obtrusiveness, and in the sestinas, which are themselves unrhymed, Cook is able to preserve formal quality quite successfully. However, he frequently changes the order of phrasing without altering the sense, as in the first two lines of Rvf. 35: "Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi/vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti" becomes "Alone in thought with lagging paces slow,/I wander measuring the barren fields." The opening emphasis on solitude survives, which is the main intent.
There are abundant examples in translations of major texts from the past of wretched decisions about diction and tone. The Victorians frequently adopted a kind of mock-archaism of style that now seems bizarre. Cook's stylistic decisions seem to me to be as follows: first, no effort to make Petrarch seem antique and remote; second, no effort to make him utterly contemporary to ourselves. He occasionally uses what we would call "poetic" terms: "tresses" in Rvf. 67, or "Noble lady mine" to open 72. But the latter is obviously employed to preserve the tone of the Italian "Gentil mia donna" again by slightly altering word order. In the same poem at line 18 he uses "vouchsafes" for "degno." I think "deigns" would have been equally poetic, but he probably wanted two syllables. Also noticeable is the survival of the more prominent figures of repetition and where possible the puns on Laura's name.
On a broader scale Cook's verse generally doesn't call attention to itself, though it certainly declares its status as poetry. That is, the translator skillfully manages verse that leads us back to the Italian, at the very least approximating in English the intensity and complexity of feeling that distinguish Petrarch. I cannot resist quoting from a haunting late sonnet that Germaine Warkentin reproduces in toto, Rvf. 315. Here is the sestet: "Presso era 'I tempo dove Amor si contra/con Castitate, et agli amanti e dato/sedersi inseme, et dir che lot incontra./Morte ebbe invidia al mio felice stato,/anzi a la speme; et feglisi a l'incontra/a mezza via come nemico armato (That time when chastity falls in with Love/Was near, and when together lovers may/Sit down to talk of anything they like./Death envied me this happy state - that is,/The hope of it, and, like a well-armed foe,/Fell on it as it went along its way).
The introduction is a model of its kind, explaining with remarkable compression and easy clarity the circumstances of the long composition and revision of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, its relationship to Petrarch's life, and the major features that made it so compelling a model for future poets. An important point made is that however much the poems derive from actual circumstances, nevertheless Petrarch constructs "a powerful fiction of the self," a fiction everywhere evident in the "scattered" and varied utterances that paradoxically make a whole. Warkentin also reminds us that Petrarch drew both on his superb classical learning and an existing tradition of poetic collections or "archives," brilliantly crafting his own with shaping consequences for the history of lyric at least through Shakespeare, and with a style and sense of structure that still draw us back to a form of passion and self-scrutiny not our own but by no means remote or alien. Cook's translation and Warkentin's introduction will be more than welcome to late medieval and Renaissance scholars and should be useful for years to come.
ROBERT L. MONTGOMERY University of California, Irvine
