Goethe compared translators to carriers, who convey good wine to market, though it gets unaccountably watered by the way. The more one praises a poem, the more absurd becomes one’s position, perhaps, in trying to translate it. If it is so admirable,—is the natural inquiry,—why not let it alone? It is a doubtful blessing to the human race, that the instinct of translation still prevails, stronger than reason; and after one has once yielded to it, then each untranslated favorite is like the trees round a backwoodsman’s clearing, each of which stands, a silent defiance, until he has cut it down. Let us try the axe again. This is to Laura singing ([Quando Amor]).
As I look across the bay, there is seen resting over all the hills, and even upon every distant sail, an enchanted veil of palest blue, that seems woven out of the very souls of happy days,—a bridal veil, with which the sunshine weds this soft landscape in summer. Such and so indescribable is the atmospheric film that hangs over these poems of Petrarch’s; there is a delicate haze about the words, that vanishes when you touch them, and reappears as you recede. How it clings, for instance, round this sonnet ([Aura che quelle chiome])!
Consider also the pure and reverential tenderness of one like this ([Qual donna attende]). A companion sonnet, on the other hand ([O passi sparsi]), seems rather to be of the Shakespearean type; the successive phrases set sail, one by one, like a yacht squadron; each spreads its graceful wings and glides away. It is hard to handle this white canvas without soiling. Macgregor, in the only version of this sonnet which I have seen, abandons all attempt at rhyme; but to follow the strict order of the original in this respect is a part of the pleasant problem which one cannot bear to forgo. And there seems a kind of deity who presides over this union of languages, and who sometimes silently lays the words in order, after all one’s poor attempts have failed.
Yonder flies a kingfisher, and pauses, fluttering like a butterfly in the air, then dives toward a fish, and, failing, perches on the projecting wall. Doves from neighboring dove-cots alight on the parapet of the fort, fearless of the quiet cattle who find there a breezy pasture. These doves, in taking flight, do not rise from the ground at once, but, edging themselves closer to the brink, with a caution almost ludicrous in such airy things, thrust themselves upon the breeze with a shy little hop, and at the next moment are securely on the wing.
How the abundant sunlight inundates everything! The great clumps of grass and clover are imbedded in it to the roots; it flows in among their stalks, like water; the lilac-bushes bask in it eagerly; the topmost leaves of the birches are burnished. A vessel sails by with plash and roar, and all the white spray along her side is sparkling with sunlight. Yet there is sorrow in the world, and it reached Petrarch even before Laura died,—when it reached her. One exquisite sonnet ([I’ vidi in terra]) shows this to have been true.
These sonnets are in Petrarch’s earlier manner; but the death of Laura brought a change. Look at yonder schooner coming down the bay straight toward us; she is hauled close to the wind, her jib is white in the sunlight, her larger sails are touched with the same snowy lustre, and all the swelling canvas is rounded into such lines of beauty as scarcely anything else in the world—hardly even the perfect outlines of the human form—can give. Now she comes up into the wind, and goes about with a strong flapping of her sails, smiting on the ear at a half-mile’s distance; then she glides off on the other tack, showing the shadowed side of her sails, until she reaches the distant zone of haze. So change the sonnets after Laura’s death, growing shadowy as they recede, until the very last ([Gli occhi di ch’io parlai]) seems to merge itself in the blue distance.
“And yet I live!” (Ed io pur vivo) What a pause is implied before these words with which the closing sestet of this sonnet begins! the drawing of a long breathy immeasurably long; like that vast interval of heart-beats which precedes Shakespeare’s ‘Since Cleopatra died.’ I can think of no other passage in literature that has in it the same wide spaces of emotion. Another sonnet ([Soleasi nel mio cor]) which is still more retrospective, seems to me the most stately and concentrated in the whole volume. It is the sublimity of a despair not to be relieved by utterance. In a later strain ([Levommi il mio pensier]) he rises to that dream which is more than earth’s realities.
It vindicates the emphatic reality and personality of Petrarch’s love, after all, that when from these heights of vision he surveys and resurveys his life’s long dream, it becomes to him more and more definite, as well as more poetic, and is farther and farther from a merely vague sentimentalism. In his later sonnets, Laura grows more distinctly individual to us; her traits show themselves as more characteristic, her temperament more intelligible, her precise influence upon Petrarch clearer. What delicate accuracy of delineation is seen, for instance, in the sonnet ([Dolci durezze])! In the sonnet ([Gli angeli eletti]) visions multiply upon visions. Would that one could transfer into English the delicious way in which the sweet Italian rhymes recur and surround and seem to embrace each other, and are woven and unwoven and interwoven, like the heavenly hosts that gathered around Laura.