MICHAEL ANGELO´S SONNETS
Michael Angelo is revealed by his sonnets. He wears the triple crown of painter, poet, and sculptor, and his genius was worshipped with a kind of awe even while he lived, yet we know the man best through these little pieces of himself which he broke off and gave to his friends. The fragments vibrated with the life of the man, and were recognized as wonderful things. Even in his lifetime they were treasured and collected in manuscript, and at a later day they were seized upon by the world at large.
The first published edition of the sonnets was prepared for the press many years after the death of the author by his grandnephew, who edited them to suit the taste of the seventeenth century. The extent and atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. But the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in 1863, Guasti gave the original readings to the public, the world was prepared for them. The bibliography of editions and translations which Guasti gives is enough to show the popularity of the sonnets, their universal character, their international currency.
There are upward of one hundred sonnets in every stage of perfection, and they have given rise not only to a literature of translations, but to a literature of comment. Some years ago Mrs. Ednah Cheney published a selection of the sonnets, giving the Italian text, together with English translations by various hands. This little volume has earned the gratitude of many to whom it made known the sonnets. The Italians themselves have gone on printing the corrupt text in contempt of Guasti's labors. But it has not been left to the Italians to protect the treasures of their land. The barbarians have been the devoutest worshippers at all times. The last tribute has come from Mr. John Addington Symonds, who has done the sonnets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites, and done them, on the whole, amazingly well. His translations of the more graceful sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise at times into beauty. He has, however, insisted on polishing the rugged ones. Moreover, being deficient in reverence, Mr. Symonds fails to convey reverence. Nevertheless, to have boldly planned and carried out the task of translating them all was an undertaking of so much courage, and has been done with so much success, that every rival must give in his admiration.
The poems are exceedingly various, some being rough and some elegant, some obvious and some obscure, some humorous, some religious. Yet they have this in common, that each seems to be the bearer of some deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and whose truth we recognize. From the very beginning they seem to have had a provocative and stimulating effect upon others; ever since they were written, cultivated people have been writing essays about them. One of them has been the subject of repeated academical disquisition. They absorb and reflect the spirit of the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many different educational conditions. Place them in what light you will, they gleam with new meanings. This is their quality. It is hard to say whence the vitality comes. They have often a brilliancy that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,—a brilliancy like that produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. They have, as it were, an organic force which nothing can render. The best of them have the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader. The profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable depths of meaning. These sonnets are protean in character; they represent different things to different people,—religion to one, love to another, philosophy to a third.
It is easy to guess what must be the fate of such poems in translation. The translator inevitably puts more of himself than of Michael Angelo into his version. Even the first Italian editor could not let them alone. He felt he must dose them with elegance. This itching to amend the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. A translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not at liberty to retain the equivocal suggestiveness of the original. The language of a translation must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse is very often neither the one nor the other.
The selections which follow are not given as representative of the different styles in the original. They have been chosen from among those sonnets which seemed most capable of being rendered into English.
The essential nature of the sonnet is replete with difficulty, and special embarrassments are encountered in the Italian sonnet. The Italian sonnet is, both in its form and spirit, a thing so foreign to the English idea of what poetry should be, that no cultivation can ever domesticate it into the tongue. The seeds of flowers from the Alps may be planted in our gardens, but a new kind of flower will come up; and this is what has happened over and over again to the skilled gardeners of English literature in their struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy, for six hundred years, the sonnet has been the authorized form for a disconnected remark of any kind. Its chief aim is not so much to express a feeling as an idea—a witticism—a conceit—a shrewd saying—a clever analogy—a graceful simile—a beautiful thought. Moreover, it is not primarily intended for the public; it has a social rather than a literary function.