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Aside from Shakespeare, no other Renaissance writer has been translated so widely and repeatedly as Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)—time-honored testimony to his lasting appeal, which has transcended ages and cultures. Petrarch (as he is known to the English-speaking world) still speaks to us as powerfully and engagingly as he did nearly seven hundred years ago when his resonant and passionate voice first sounded through his love poetry. Indeed, passion is Petrarch’s distinguishing imprint, particularly in his collection of poems in Italian (not Latin) which he entitled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Poetic Fragments in the Vernacular), now called Canzoniere (Lyric Poems). It is from Canzoniere’s 366 pieces—Petrarch intended them to be read one per day, like the Catholic Breviary, over the course of a year—that the present volume takes its 24 selections to comprise Longing for Laura. As its intentional allusion to the Breviary suggests, the Canzoniere is an extended meditation, a hymnal of sorts containing some of the greatest love poems in all literature—or, more specifically, “hopeless love,” the yearning for and unattainable, forbidden woman. “Laura,” of course, is the object of the poet’s desire. Scholars have determined that Petrarch’s inspirational provenance for these poems was a beautiful woman named Laurette de Noves, whom he first met in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon on April 6, 1327. Madame de Noves had already been married for a few years and was the mother of several children when Petrarch met her. Nevertheless, as the poems reveal, Petrarch was fervently attracted to her physical beauty, her motherly grace, and her spiritual endowment—a worshipful attraction that lasted more than thirty years. Petrarch was obligated by the strictures of his religious faith to adore her from afar, hopelessly, until her death in 1348 (twenty-one years after their meeting). For ten years after her death he continued to express his devotion to her memory in poetry. The speaker of the Canzoniere is a poet, the protagonist and central focus of the sequence of poems. Just as Laura is a poetic invention—albeit one putatively based on Madame de Noves—so is the poems’ speaker an invention, a literary alter ego of Petrarch, one tormented by apprehension and guilt over his forbidden love of Laura. Canzoniere 1 and 365 —that is, the opening and the penultimate poems, both of which are included here—speak of Laura figuratively as any temptation that can lead one astray from the path of eternal salvation. Although not all of the Canzoniere are about Laura (some are odes on friendship, politics, and the church), they all concern the speaker-poet-protagonist, collectively portraying a melancholy and nostalgic man brooding over impossible love. Laura is simultaneously the woman he cannot have and the representation of all of his unrequited desires. She stands for unconsummated love, an ideal beyond attainment and therefore consummately desirable. This is the principal thematic thread binding together the Canzoniere. A. M. Juster’s brief selection presented here in a letterpress edition concentrates on the major emotional and spiritual ramifications resulting from the speaker’s “longing for Laura,” a longing intensified by the cultural, religious, and moral fates that have deemed her unreachable. Perhaps this is the reason for our age’s attraction to Petrarch, that his deepest torments are shockingly foreign and mysteriously antiquated compared to our culture’s insistence on immediate (if not satisfactory) gratification of our every whim and concupiscent impulse. No matter how cynical and callous our current attitudes toward romantic love and unfulfilled desire, however, we seem never to tire of literary manifestations of the heroic pursuit of the ideal and of the noble despite the impossibility of achievement. The resurgent popularity of Dante—whose disappointed love for Beatrice served as a general model for Petrarch—along with favorite modern expressions of unattainable love, such as Gatsby’s fascination with Daisy and Yeats’s for Maude Gonne, strike a persistent chord “in the deep heart’s core,” to borrow from Yeats. The introspective, personal speaker-poet of the Canzoniere is recognizable, too, in a great deal of contemporary poetry, where “confessionalism” is commonplace. Juster now joins the venerable line of poets who have translated “the Laura poems” into English, each generation refiguring Petrarch’s Italian into its own vernacular and idiom. The earliest in this line is Chaucer, whose translations began before Petrarch died. (Chaucer even “translated” the poet’s name to Petrarch, by which he has been known in English ever since.) Edmund Spenser, The Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt—luminaries of the English Renaissance—all translated him as well, holding up Petrarch as the ideal Renaissance poet, one who embodies in his work classical structures and romantic themes. While sonnets predominate the Canzoniere—so popular and influential were these poems that the “Italian sonnet” form has since become synonymously known as the “Petrarchan sonnet” form—other lyric forms are deftly employed, such as the sestina, which Juster has translated admirably in Canzoniere 22 and 239. Unlike many English renditions, Juster has preserved quite artfully the classic Petrarchan octave in the sonnet, rhyming abbaabba—difficult to maintain in English, a language not as easily given to rhyme as the Italian, demonstrated by the sometimes forced or otherwise stilted rhymes used by the Earl of Surrey for instance. Erudite speculation has it that Shakespeare could not adequately rhyme within the abbaabba schema when writing his sonnets and therefore abandoned the Italian form in favor of the English form, which calls for rhyme pairs instead of quartets. Most English-language poets would concur that it is very hard to rhyme an Italian sonnet well, giving rise to the common octave variant of addacddc one regularly finds in English renderings of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Not so with Juster’s translations—his remain true to the Italian and true to Petrarch’s abbaabba rhyme scheme. Even more remarkable, Juster does so in a modern idiom that preserves the integrity and flavor of the Petrarchan original. He achieves this in part by his skillful use of enjambment so that the rhymes never call undue attention to themselves, an example of which can be found in the first stanza of Canzoniere 2: In order to extract revenge with grace Juster translates with a poet’s ear for the sonic beauty of language, as these lines demonstrate his ear for both Petrarch’s metrical rhythm and his vernacular. Integral to an understanding of the complex personality and emotions of the speaker-poet is Canzoniere 23, which Juster makes gracefully accessible to us. In this long, blank verse poem of varying rhymes, the speaker-poet asks himself, upon acute self-examination, “Alas, what am I? Was I?” The simple answer, revealed in the ensuing, memorable lines, is that he is a poet, the purity of his art tempered by his all-consuming emotions. Laura, he knows, is his ars poetica; he turns his longing for her, his hopeless love of her, into lyric poetry of lasting wonderment—the poems presented in the following pages, which record his story of commitment and despair in a language and manner suited for our time. Juster’s pitch-perfect translations of the heart of Petrarch remind us of our emotional vulnerability, a trait that defines us as human beings. This is why Petrarch endures.
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