A Petrarchan sonnet, a love poem in a fresh translation

January 20, 2024

“Given the impossibility of reproducing Petrarch’s verbal music in English,” writes Peter Thornton in his introduction to Petrach’s Canzoniere, “I decided that my goal was not to convey the matter of Petrarch’s sonnets and canzoni in adequately carpentered English that closely followed his grammar, let alone his difficult Italian syntax, which the Italian commentators not infrequently feel they need to explain to Italian readers. My goal was rather to create modern English poems that made Petrarch present to a contemporary Anglophone reader, conveying emotional impact on their own, singing and weeping believably in the idiom of our day, the verses pulsing with a life of their own, so that to some extent the poems would constitute independent creations.”

As an occasional treat, we will be posting some of Peter’s exquisite translations of Petrarchan sonnets here. Here’s the poet, and his love for Laura:

218      Tra quantunque leggiadre donne et belle

Among whichever beauties she appears,

the one who has no peer from east to west,

the beauty of her face does to the rest

what morning does to all the lesser stars.

Love seems to me to whisper in my ear,

saying, “As long as she is in the world

life will be good, but later dark and cold;

virtue will die, my kingdom disappear.

“Should sun and moon be taken from the skies,

the grass and leaves from earth, the winds from air

and from man his intelligence and speech,

“the sea denuded of its waves and fish:

so will the world be desolate and more,

should Death forever close and veil her eyes.”