Three more of my translated poems from Vittoria Colonna to be published

Vittorio DiMeglio — Ponte Vecchio in Florence

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been such a long time since the last selection or couple of poems translated by me from Vittora Colonna’s Amaro Lagrimar (Bitter Crying), as I call her immense sonnet sequence – the phrase taken from her first poem, “Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia” (Englished by me as “I write to vent the inward pain my heart”) that I’m going to announce this small publication here. A representative from John Wiley wrote me to ask permission for a number of my translated poems to be published in a large anthology they will be publishing, Gender in History: Global Perspectives, edited by Weiser-Hanks. The first scholarly biography of Colonna was written in German, and her complete oeuvre has been translated into German. The Germans and the French too (especially later 19th century Romantics) have been drawn to Colonna’s poetry. I admit I know little about it, but then I knew little about the two Master’s theses that have used my translation or the two festivals at which another few were read, or even the couple of other anthologies they have appeared in. Most of this some 20 years ago, for a couple of years after I put them online.

I am encouraged and chuffed because it’s a sign my poetry is still read. Jim (my late husband) had some software program where he kept track of how many hits different part of my website attracted and there was a time there was frequent interest in these poems, and also the poetry of Veronica Gambara, Colonna’s contemporary, and my brief portrait biography of Gambara and chapter on Colonna. Nowadays I think the interest that my website draws is towards the material on Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen, Anne Finch, and various individual papers, people, subjects (e.g., Poldark).

I spent nearly 20 years working on Colonna and Gambara and Anne Finch before I put my work on the Internet, and remain fascinated by translation (theory, practice, individual works) and in love with much of their poetry.  Now and again I’ve returned to Gambara.  For Anne  Finch I’ve worked more conventionally within academic conventions and parameters (see two blogs).  So anytime anyone contacts me on any of this, I feel my contribution is valued.

Here then are three of those chosen: the first of the sequence (this is common), a highly erotic one (ditto) and one connecting her to Michelangelo.

I write to vent the inward pain my heart
feeds upon–I seek nothing else–surely
no-one can think I mean to add to the
splendor this buried gladiator cast.

I am right to obey my urge to mourn;
though the thought I damage his fame hurts me,
I am leaving to other pens, wiser
heads the task of saving his name from death.

May rooted loyalty, love, and a weight
of sorrow, this anguish neither reason
nor time can lessen–excuse me to each of you.

Bitter crying, a song which is not sweet,
bleak sighs, a disquieted voice: I’ll boast
not of my style but of my suffering.

****************************

Like a ravenous bird who sees and hears
the whirr of his mother’s sheltering wings
as she descends, embraces, and feeds him,
who loves the food and her, and is happy

inside the nest, but frets too, consumed by
his yearning to follow and fly like her,
and so thanks her by singing such songs as
seem beyond the tongue’s power to release,

am I when God’s sun strengthens my heart with
a warm ray–like the lightning’s flash felt
and vanished before we have half-glimpsed it–

the pen moves, pushed by a surge of love from
within, and without realizing quite
what I’m saying, I write in praise of God

****************************

That which the human mind can comprehend
of eternal truths we can teach ourselves,
through long study, guided by rare insight,
I believe your soul has comprehended,

so it’s not that I mean to add a prop
or light to your massive near unique faith–
so obvious to anyone who learns
from your work that there is another world–

in offering you this image of Christ
offering his heart up to the spear as
he hangs on the cross to stream holy life

from His body to you, but because, Sir,
a more learned book was never opened–
this will give you your immortality.

**********************************

As I read over my poetry, I can see it is very beautiful, a true projection of the spirit and meaning of Colonna’s poems in appropriate modern English.

This is what I have to say about my choices and arrangements of the poems:

For Vittoria Colonna there are over 50 different manuscripts which contain sizable numbers of poems; there are considerable variants between individual texts and orderings. Unlike Alan Bullock who has taken what A. E. Housman calls an uncritical stance by choosing one copy text and mostly sticking to it — I have studied all the texts available to me, including the many studies and analsyses of Colonna’s poetry that have been published since 1538 and Ruscelli’s important first commentaries. I can here only refer the interested reader to the recent work of Tobia R. Toscana (Sonetti : in morte di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos marchese di Pescara: edizione del ms. XIII.G.43 della Biblioteca nazionale di Napoli / Vittoria Colonna [1492-1547] (Milano: G. Mondadori, 1998) who has herself returned to the manuscripts, carefully examined Bullock’s tables and arguments together with new evidence and studies by Carlo Dionosotti and Danilo Romei (whose work on Colonna I have not been able to see); she concludes that Bullock’s edition is flawed by his decision to follow a single manuscript for the opening phase of Colonna’s poetry and is not substantiated by Tordi’s studies (as Bullock had simply assumed). I studied all the documents Tordi and Reumont had unearthed; referred myself to their texts for Vittoria’s life. I also used the newer studies (e.g., Carlo Ossola, Mila Mazzetti, Paolo Simoncelli, Massimo Firpo) placing Vittoria’s poetry in the context of evangelism and politics of her period and the poetry of her friends. In many cases I have followed Visconti: his texts are frequently exactly those of Bullock with different punctuation or grammar. In those cases where they are not, they are sometimes superior. When Bullock’s are more precise, more polished, I chose Bullock’s as my main copy text, but always kept Visconti in front of me. When Visconti has a “bad” text that clearly contain mistakes, I follow Bullock. Uniformly the first Italian line quoted at the top of my pages and in my index is from Bullock’s edition: this is for the convenience of the reader who may own Bullock’s 1982 edition.

I also arranged them for the first time. I divided the poems into those in which Vittoria is communing with herself; and those where she addresses herself to imagined others. For the first part, I followed a slow trajectory of emotion which can be discerned in the sequence from erotic enthrallment to disillusion, to a turning to God and after many struggles with despair, a conversion experience and some tranquillity and health. For the second I followed the discernable story of Vittoria’s life within her family, in public, and as a writer. I made it much easier for readers to find those poems which are directed to her friends and written in response to other poems by putting them in groups in accordance with their interlocutors. Her devotional meditative sequences are similarly arranged. Finally, Vittoria made several starts as a poet: all those poems which justify her sequence, which apologize for it, and are intended as prologue are placed first; those poems which show the early planning of the sequence, and are close literary imitations are placed just after her husband’s death. While my arrangment is subjective, the result of long reading and translating these poems and documents on Colonna’s life, I think it is makes sense of the relationships among the poems and between the poems and Vittoria Colonna’s life for the first time. I am convinced that the present disarrangement, the result of happenstance and mistake, is one of the reasons Colonna’s poetry is not more frequently read and not thought well of. At last a reader will be able to find a poem by knowing something about its provenance, who is its interlocutor, or its nature

Here is my theory of translation as applied to Gambara and Colonna. Simply put, I gave them everything that was in me at the time.

I have been re-studying Italian once again by reading Elena Ferrante’s Storia di chi fugga e di chi resta (The Story of Who Leave and Those Who Stay), about which I hope to write eventually (how the Italian is far superior to the English, which smooths out, modernizes somehow, simplifies and loses the original densities). I had given the studying up once again as the term started, but now I’ll hold out for an hour a day.

Last spring I had begun to read carefully the most recent biographies, Ramie Targoff’s conventional safe Life of Vittoria Colonna (but accurate in the main) and Maria Musiol’s brilliantly empathetic and daring portrait of the woman out of the poetry as well as the life, Spurs and Reins: Vittoria Colonna: A woman’s Renaissance. I will now try to get back to them — perhaps in December so I can write a dual review.

Ellen