A question of valore translating Cavalcanti & Dante.

In translating, as in reading, the so-called stilnovistic poetry of Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri, one must pay careful attention to changes in semantic value which some words have undergone since the thirteenth century. This is no more evident than in terms these poets adopted from the language of contemporary writings on natural philosophy. The use of one such word, spirito, in the poetry of Cavalcanti and Dante is here examined in detail. What does the adoption of such language reveal about the poets' aesthetic aims, and what difficulties does it pose for the translator? Finally, how can the changes in language over time which lead to such problems be overcome?

TRANSLATING ACROSS THE CENTURIES

Over the past two years I have been working on a series of verse translations of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. The translator, in order to translate, must have a good sense of what it is he or she is attempting to 'bring over' from a foreign language. The act of translation is, therefore, a critical and interpretative act before it is a creative act. This obviously poses many difficulties for the translator. But a further specific difficulty arises in interpreting the lyric poetry of the two Florentines Guido Cavalcanti (c.1250-1300) and Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). (1) These two friends, writing when Italian was still in its infancy as a literary language, made use of a range of terms, such as donna and spirito, which may appear to be easily interpretable and, therefore, translatable respectively as 'woman' and 'spirit', but which, in fact, have changed their sphere of semantic value considerably in the six centuries since. As the philologist Gianfranco Contini wrote in his essay 'Esercizio d'interpretazione sopra un sonetto di Dante' ('An exercise in interpretation of a sonnet by Dante'), the modern reader must pay careful attention to the semantic value, or valore, of words whose meaning in the thirteenth century was far removed from that of contemporary Italian. (2) Such changes must be addressed by the translator in order to avoid misinterpretation, but the translator must also find a means of indicating to the reader that a term, such as 'spirit', is not to be read at face value. The best way to do this is to provide annotations to the translations which allow the reader to contextualise the foreignness of the original.

It is sometimes observed that for a variety of reasons the English of Chaucer is further from contemporary English than the Italian of Dante is from Italian today. To some extent this may be true, and it may make studying Chaucer more difficult than studying Dante. But at least the unfamiliar orthography and vocabulary in Chaucer remind the reader of the fact that writings from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries need to be interpreted with care. In the case of Cavalcanti and the early poetry of Dante this problem is no more evident than in words such as 'spirito', whose definitions Cavalcanti adopted from the language of contemporary natural philosophy. He chose what had been exclusively scientific terms and incorporated them into his poetry with the intention of charting changes in the physiological and psychological state of the lover as precisely as possible. It is worth remembering that Cavalcanti himself was considered somewhat of a natural philosopher (that is, someone who interpreted the natural world and the human being through the texts of Aristotle and his commentators), and that one of the most celebrated interpretations of Cavalcanti's doctrinal canzone 'Donna me prega' ('A woman bids me') was by the contemporary Florentine physician Dino del Garbo. (3) It was on this basis that De Sanctis was able to talk of the stilnovisti, (4) and particularly Cavalcanti, as both poets and scientists. (5)

But to what extent can we consider these poets as scientists, and how precisely can we, as readers in the twenty-first century, define and translate terms found in their poetry, which were adopted from the language of natural philosophy? Does the scientific strain in the writing make the translator's job any easier?

SPIRITO IN DANTE & CAVALCANTI

In order to consider these questions I would like to look closely at one such word, 'spirito', in the poetry of Cavalcanti and in that of Dante's stilnovistic phase. In these two poets' predecessors we find the term used once by Guido delle Colonne and once again by Guido Guinizzelli. In the fifty-two poems by Cavalcanti, however, 'spirito' recurs forty-five times. (6) Throughout Dante's lyric poetry (approximately twice as many lines of verse as Cavalcanti) we find it twenty-three times, and these are concentrated in the first fourteen chapters of the Vita Nuova. (7)

It is clearly a term of central importance, then. The intended meaning was not that of the theological sense ('soul'), nor the third person of the Trinity, though these will be the principal meanings when Dante uses the word in the Commedia. The predominant meaning is that which Cavalcanti adopted from the natural philosophy of Albert the Great: 'In corpore omnis animalis est corpus subtile quod vocatur spiritus ... Est igitur instrumentum animae directum ad omnes operationes eius ... et est vehiculum vitae et omnium operationum vitae' ('In the body of all animals there is a subtle body that is called spirit ... It is an instrument of the soul and is in charge of all its operations ... and it is the vehicle of life and every operation necessary for life'). (8) The spirits were minute and invisible substances working in human beings. In the words of Foster and Boyde, they were 'the carriers of psycho-physical life', (9) or what we might call one's life-force, though they were actual substances and more precisely defined than this English expression denotes. They were of three types: the natural spirit which had its origin and seat in the liver, and whose function was to diffuse itself through the veins and provide nourishment to the body; the vital spirit which formed in the heart and moved about the body via the arteries, and whose function was the providing of life energy and respiration to the body; thirdly the animal spirit, which resided in the brain, and which, via the nerves, sent messages from the senses back to the brain, and connected the three parts of the brain (imagination, memory and thought).

If the spirits are essential to the normal functioning of the body, then it is not surprising that in the poetry of Cavalcanti, whose primary theme is that of the poet's suffering for love, such sbigottimento (10) is demonstrated, and enacted to dramatic effect, through a dysfunction of the spirits. Such lines as the following from Cavalcanti's poetry are not uncommon: 'Amore ruppe / tutti miei spiriti a fuggire' ('Love forced all my spirits to flee') [IX], or 'E dico che miei spiriti son morti' ('And I say that all my spirits are dead') [XI]. (11) In 'Deh, spiriti miei' ('Ah, my spirits') [VI] the sonnet is addressed directly to the poet's own spirits, asking them to comfort firstly the narrator in general by sending out from the mind 'parole adornate / di pianto, dolorose e sbigottite' (words adorned / with tears, painful and shocked'). In the second quatrain they are asked to assist the heart, and finally in the sextet they are asked to help the 'alma triste' ('sad soul'). (12) Similarly Dante, at the beginning of the Vita Nuova, gives a long description of the spirit's trembling, crying, and speaking in Latin, as a response to the first apparition of Beatrice. (13)

Let us pause here to note that, while 'spirito' is used literally in all these examples, and clearly corresponds to its use in the context of natural philosophy, there are in fact other rhetorical devices at work which characterise these writings as poetry rather than natural philosophy. Most notable among these is the personification of the spirits. Dante has them speaking in Latin, while in Cavalcanti they run away in fear or are the addressee of a sonnet. This personification and dramatisation of the poet's individual faculties on the stage of the lover's internal self is one example of the poetry at work. Secondly, the rhetorical device of overstatement plays an important role. Obviously when Cavalcanti says 'my spirits are dead' ('i miei spiriti son morti') the death is metaphorical and we have therefore moved away from the literal meaning of spirit as it might be used by a natural philosopher. Death is often the point to which the internal sbigottimento of the poet leads. This, I would say, is the point in Cavalcanti's work where the precision of description through technical language, which gives scientific credibility to the writing, is transcended, where the science stops and the vanishing point which is the realm of poetry begins.

But let us continue the examination of the spirits. Some of the most important spirits were the 'spiriti visivi' ('visual spirits'), a division of the sensitive spirits, because of the centrality of sight in the Aristotelian conception of the birth of love. It was through the eyes that Love, itself in the form of a spirit, entered the lover and usurped the lover's own spirits. This is the case in Cavalcanti's sonnet which begins: 'Pegli occhi fere un spirito sottile' ('Through the eyes a subtle spirit wounds me') [XXVIII], where the subtle spirit, 'spirito sottile', is the vision of the lady, or 'donna'. And from the Vita Nuova: 'Amor ... / prende baldanza e tanta securtate, / che fere tra' miei spiriti paurosi / e quale ancide, e qual pinge di fore, / si che solo remane a veder vui' ('Love ... / gains confidence and grows secure, / and wreaks havoc with my fearful spirits, / killing some, forcing others away, / so that only he alone remains to see you') [Vita Nuova, chapter XIV], where what remains of the poet is the visual spirit which continues to transmit the image of the lady while the rest of the lover's spirits are destroyed. We notice that by using the spirits to describe the sense's apprehension of the lady that the lover is passive in the encounter: a material, though invisible, spirit was thought to pass from the loved object to the lover and take control of him.

The visual sense predominated but the process was sometimes described more generically, as, for example, in Dante's celebrated sonnet 'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare' ('So gentle and so full of dignity my lady appears'): 'E pare che de la sua labbia si mova / un spirito soave pien d'amore / che va dicendo a l'anima: "Sospira"' ('and from her lips seems to come a spirit, gentle and full of love, that says to the soul: "Sigh"'). (14) Similarly in Cavalcanti: 'Un amoroso sguardo spiritale' ('The spirit of a noble and amorous gaze') [XXIV]; and 'Veggio negli occhi de la donna mia / un lume pien di spiriti d'amore' ('In my lady's eyes I see / a light filled with such spirits of love') [XXVI]; and finally 'Lo su' gentile spirito che ride' ('Her gentle spirit which laughs') [XIX]. Such examples, which talk of external spirits influencing the lover, are generally found in praise poems (there are only five in Cavalcanti) because it is the pleasure which they inspire which causes the lover's attraction to the loved object. It is

   The spirit of a noble and amorous gaze,
   guided by Love, has taken hold of me
   with greatest force, and more than in
   any other phase
   joy now draws me to think whole
   heartily
   of her, my lady, who is not touched by
   phrase
   of tribute, or sign of patience, or piety:
   indeed the cruel relentless games she
   plays
   cause death to grip my heart's vitality.

   Un amoroso sguardo spiritale
   m'ha renovato Amor, tanto piacente
   ch'assa' piu che non sol ora m'assale
   e stringem'a pensar coralmente
   della mia donna, verso cu' non vale
   merzede ne pieta ne star soffrente,
   che soventora mi da pena tale,
   che 'n poca parte il mi' cor vita
   sente.

what such spirits do once they enter the lover and take control which Cavalcanti exploited and made the trade mark of his poetry, as the contrast in tone between the two quatrains in sonnet XXIV indicates:

The plural form of the term, 'spiriti', was sometimes used to describe all the lover's various internal spirits. When this happened they tended to be grouped together as vital spirits, and were therefore linked to the heart, which was of central importance in the physiological functioning of the body and of Love's conquest of the lover. We may recall, for example, the definition in Dante's poetic manifesto and self commentary, the Convivio: 'li spiriti umani che quasi sono principalmente vapori del cuore' ('the human spirits which are above all vapours in the heart') [II, xiii, 24]. In Cavalcanti: 'De la gran doglia che l'anima sente / si parte da lo core uno sospiro / che va dicendo "spiriti, fuggite"' ('Out of the great grief that the soul feels, / A sigh issues forth from the heart / That says continually: "Spirits, you flee"') [XXXIII]; and 'e senti come 'l cor si sbatte forte / per quel che ciascun spirito ragiona' ('and feel the way my heart beats out of control / because each vital spirit speaks of strife') [XXXV], where ragionare, to reason, stands for dire, to say, which is itself in Cavalcanti often associated with the manifestation of passion. On other rare occasions spirito stands for the whole individual, as in Cavalcanti, 'riguarda se 'l mi' spirito ha pesanza' ('consider how my own spirit suffers') [XXXVIII], a meaning which is closer to that later adopted in the Commedia.

   Through the eyes strikes a delicate spirit
   That awakens a spirit in the mind,
   From which stirs the spirit of loving
   That ennobles every other little spirit.

   A lowly spirit can have no feeling of it,
   As spirit of such great strength does it
   appear:

   This is the little spirit that makes one
   tremble,

   The little spirit that makes the lady
   charitable.

   Then from this spirit comes
   Another sweet gentle spirit
   Which is followed by a little spirit of
   favor:

   This little spirit rains spirits,
   For it has the key to each spirit
   By virtue of a spirit that sees. (15)

   Pegli occhi fere un spirito sottile,
   che fa 'n la mente spirito destare,
   dal qual si move spirito d'amare,
   ch'ogn'altro spiritel[lo] fa gentile.

   Sentir non po di lu' spirito vile,
   di cotanta vertu spirito appare:

   quest'e lo spiritel che fa tremare,
   lo spiritel che fa la donna umile.

   E poi da questo spirito si move
   un altro dolce spirito soave,
   che siegue un spiritello di mercede:

   lo quale spiritel spiriti piove,
   che di ciascuno spirit'ha la chiave,
   per forza d'uno spirito che 'l vede.

In order to see all these meanings at work in one poem I want to look closely at Cavalcanti's sonnet 'Pegli occhi fere un spirito sottile' [XXVIII]. It is a remarkable poem because in its fourteen lines the word spirito is found fifteen times.

Clearly Cavalcanti is sending up his own fondness for the word, but also demonstrating his linguistic ingenuity and playfulness. Such irony and linguistic skill set the writing in the realm of poetry. Yet we cannot say that in the repeated use of the term the poet is trying to fragment a literal semantic value. The poem's aim is once more to demonstrate the importance of the spirits in the process of love. As we saw, the 'sprito sottile' of line one is the image of the lady. This spirit enters the lover via the eyes and moves to the brain where it awakens the vital spirit (line two), which in turn sends out the message to the heart to wake the spirit of love, which itself exists there in potency until such a moment when it becomes an act. Dante uses a similar image in the sonnet 'Amore e 'l cor gentil sono una cosa' ('Love and the gentle heart are one thing'). The prose commentary to this poem describes 'questo sonetto si divide in due parti: ne la prima dico di lui [Amore] in quanto e in potenza; ne la seconda dico di lui in quanto in potenza si riduce in atto' ('This sonnet can be divided into two parts: in the first I speak of him [Love] as a potentiality; in the second I speak of him in so far as he turns from a potential into a manifest nature') [Vita Nuova, chapter XX, 6.]

To return to Cavalcanti's poem, this spirit of love sedates all the lover's vital spirits (here the diminutive is used in line four). In the second quatrain the term is used generically as a synonym for soul or individual. The spirit-vision of line one cannot be experienced by unworthy people (line five), because it is (line six, 'spirito di virtu') spiritually perfect or noble. In lines seven and eight the subject is still the spirit of love--the real protagonist of the sonnet--and its power is shown firstly in its ability to make one tremble, and secondly in so far as it can render the lady benevolent. That is to say that Love can have a similar influence on the lady as it has on the lover. Again Dante's sonnet quoted above, which bears many resemblances to the present poem, ends: 'E simil face in donna omo valente' ('And a similar effect in woman is produced by the noble man'). In line nine the spirit of love wakes a 'dolce spirito soave' ('sweet suave spirit') which is that 'dolcezza al core' ('sweetness in the heart') of which Dante spoke in 'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare' (and note also line thirteen of this sonnet: 'un spirito soave pien d'amore' ['a suave spirit full of love']). This in turn is followed by the 'spiritello di mercede' ('little spirit of mercy' [line eleven]), which would appear to be a manifestation of the lady's compassion to the lover, if we take as authority another poem by Cavalcanti: 'ma po' sostenne, quando vide uscire / degli occhi vostri un lume di merzede / che porse dentr' al cor nova dolcezza' ('But then it held back when it saw issuing / From your eyes a gleam of favour / That infused into my heart unusual sweetness') [XXII, lines 9-11]. In line twelve the spirit of compassion causes a shower of sighs in the lover because it possesses power over all the vital spirits, 'ciascun spirito', and this power is granted thanks to a spirit of sight (line fourteen), that is, because the lover saw the 'spiritello de mercede'. The syntax is rather contorted in this last tercet in order that the act of sight opens and closes the sonnet (and note that both lines one and fourteen begin with the preposition per).

To summarise this brief examination of the term spirit, then, as can be seen, the word was used with a variety of meanings, which take us far from the connotations 'spirit' has today. Principally it indicated the invisible substances which were thought to be necessary for the functioning of the human body. But, as we saw, it could also stand for the vision of the loved object as it enters the lover, and finally, spirit could be a generic term for an individual or his life force. There is, however, no question of confusion as to the intended meaning in each circumstance, for the context clearly indicates which sense of the word is intended.

DIFFICULTIES FOR THE TRANSLATOR OF POETRY

Let us turn now to the translator. Is his or her job made any easier because of the use of such terms? Clearly we are not looking for an English word with the same innuendoes and shades of meaning (sfumature) as the original. The most suitable English translation will normally be 'spirit' or 'spirits', though 'life-force' and 'vital energy' may convey the meaning in some contexts. But 'spirit' has the same plurality of meaning today as its Italian equivalent. Neither of them express the quite specific concepts our poets intended. At the same time, the very familiarity of the words makes the risk of misinterpretation, or complacent reading, quite high. In using the plural 'spirits' in relation to an individual the reader is forced to question the meaning somewhat, and obviously through the context one can suggest vestiges of the original meaning still found in English today. Think, for example, of the expression 'to be in high spirits'. But on the whole, we are so far away from the view of the world presented by the stilnovisti that it is necessary to put aside our conceptions of a term like 'spirit', and try to redefine it with the assistance of annotations to the translations.

Given such a need for detailed annotations it is remarkable that of the four existing translations of Cavalcanti into English not one offers more than the barest outline of such. (16) In the two most prominent cases, those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ezra Pound, it is worth remembering that they were poets in their own right before they were translators. Their translations read, therefore, more like poetic exercises than accurate versions, and examination of them reveals that both poets were happy to leave words such as those we have looked at above in a state of semantic imprecision for poetic effect. But the two more recent editions do use a minimum of annotations which, while they lend a scholarly appearance to their work, are not satisfactory for bridging the cultural, linguistic and chronological gaps.

Critical notes are a necessary part of the translation process in working with the stilnovisti. As we have seen, the translator and reader alike are aided in the attempt to redefine specific terms such as spirit, because such words were taken from the language of natural philosophy. Is there, then, one might ask, a need for further translations, if the problem is that of redefining words rather than capturing semantic resonances?

For the translator of spirito, and other similar terms adopted by Cavalcanti and Dante, the problem is not so much which word in English contains the same sfumature as the original, but rather getting the readers to forget their present conception of a word and redefining it according to the specific value, or values, it was given by the poet. We can often arrive somewhere near the poet's given value because the poet intended such words to function within a defined and limited range of meaning. Let us take as an example the word donna in Dante's lyrics. It is true that it may function on various semantic levels, or layers of dress, to adopt Dante's metaphor, whether allegorical, literal, moral or anagogical, (17) but only so long as these are known and definable by the poet, as Dante tells us in his commentary in the Vita Nuova: 'pero che grande vergogna sarebbe in colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico ... e non sapesse poi dire la verita che sta sotto' ('for a great shame would befall those who put things under the veil of a figure or rhetorical colour and then not know how to explain the truth which underlies it') [XXV, 10]. In the case of the word donna the underlying literal level, too, has a much narrower range of meaning than it would have today. It must always be traced back to the Latin domina(m): meaning signora (del cuore in our case), and therefore the emphasis is on the lady's sovereignty rather than an opposition by gender, for which femmina would be used. (18)

In the examination of the term 'spirit' we saw that the word itself was used quite specifically, as if the language itself gave what the poet described a scientific validity. At the same time, however, rhetorical devices such as personification, overstatement and irony dramatised this situation as they presented the poet's inner self as a kind of stage, and placed the writing in the field of poetry. Such rhetorical techniques can be difficult to bring over into English.

But the translator's task can be made more difficult for a variety of other reasons too. Firstly, the principle, very much alive in the thirteenth century, of nomina sunt consequentia rerum, by which the name of something could embody and reproduce its essential nature, reminds us of the interdependence of words. (19) 'Core' ('heart') was not found in conjunction with 'valore', 'more' and 'amore' ('valour', 'death', and 'love') so frequently just because it was a convenient rhyme, but rather the fact that such words rhymed demonstrated a semantic interdependence. Similarly, 'spirito' cannot be fully comprehended without its etymological relation 'sospiro' ('sigh')--the two words are often found in close proximity in our poetry. All this is lost in translation.

Secondly, not all the words adopted by our poets were taken from the domain of philosophy, or used with precision, or have an equivalent in English. In Dante's self commentary and in the final refrain to some of his canzoni a metaphor recurs which likens poetry's embodiment of truth or meaning to a woman beautifully dressed. The implication appears to be that form, meter, rhyme, and rhetorical devices were considered as outer garments to the message of the poem, rather than as essential elements of the meaning itself. In 'Tre donne intorno al cor' ('Three ladies encircling the heart'): 'Canzone, a' panni tuoi non ponga uom mano, / per vedere quel che bella donna chiude: / bastin le parti nude' ('Song, let no man touch your dress to see what a fair woman is hidden there, let the uncovered parts suffice'); and Dante again addressing his canzone, 'Voi che 'ntendendo il terzo ciel movete' ('You of understanding who move the third heaven'), 'Canzone, io credo che saranno radi / color che tua ragione intendan bene, / tanto la parli faticosa e forte' ('Song, I think they will be few who clearly understand your meaning, so difficult is your speech'), but to those who do not understand you should advise: 'Ponete mente almen com' io son bella' ('Consider, at least, how I am beautiful'). It is a complex question and Dante seems to change his views on it over the course of his poetic career, though the metaphor is found twice in Purgatorio. (20)

This is not to say that the veste, or dresses, of poetry were of no importance, or of less importance than the 'message' or that the translator could separate meaning from poetry and reproduce only the first of these in a second language. These are the very elements--form, rhythm, music and rhetorical device--which distinguish poetry from prose. Poetry adorned reality in order to celebrate it, and veiled the truth in imitation of our distance from it. Where human beings were distant from truth it was through poetry that they were able to approach it. As Cavalcanti said in the closure of his praise sonnet 'Chi e questa che ven' ('Who is this that comes'): 'Non fu si alta gia la mente nostra / e non si pose 'n noi tanta salute, / che propiamente n'avian canoscenza' ('Our minds have never been so high before / nor senses touched by such a numinous ray / to hold her perfectly in thoughtfulness'). It was this idea which would lead to one of poetry's most celebrated hintings at a vision of truth, in Paradiso: 'Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio / che 'l parlar nostro, ch'a tal vista cede, / e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio' ('From here on my vision was greater / than our human language, which cedes before such sights, / just as the memory, too, fails before such excess') [XXXIII, lines 55-57].

The translator must start from the presumption that he or she understands exactly what the original poem says and is aware of how it does so. He or she then purports to reproduce that in a second language. (21) Where the writer's aim is to communicate clearly--that is where he or she knows exactly what lies beneath a poem's veste--then the translator's task must be easier. But when is this the case in poetry? How much is communicated by a word's sound, rhythm, and syntactical context? How much of a poem depends on its form and rhetorical devices? So I believe there is always going to be a need for further translations of Dante and Cavalcanti, not only to write the wrongs of past translators, but because translation is as imperfect an activity as it is also necessary. The strongest objection to the act of translating poetry is that it is impossible. But this, to quote Peter Porter, can also be its justification. (22)

ENDNOTES

(1) Few details about the life of Guido Cavalcanti have survived. He is represented by fifty-two lyric poems which survive in various manuscripts from the early fourteenth century onwards, although it is likely that he wrote more which has not survived. He was very close to Dante Alighieri and the period of mutual influence when both poets were living in Florence was to be very significant for Dante's later development and the writing of the Divine Comedy, which is his most lasting work. However, I am concerned here with the lyric poetry which Dante wrote in the 1280s and 1290s, and which culminated in the idealised autobiography, Vita Nuova (The New Life).

(2) Gianfranco Contini, 'Esercizio d'interpretazione sopra un sonetto di Dante' now in Un'idea di Dante, Einaudi, Torino, 1976. The sonnet analysed is 'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare', and Contini's description is as follows: 'Passa per il tipo di componimento linguisticamente limpido, che non richiede spiegazioni...e si puo dire invece che non ci sia parola, almeno delle essenziali, che abbia mantenuto nella lingua moderna il valore dell'originale', 21-22.

(3) Dino del Garbo's 'Commento' can now be found in Enrico Fenzi, La canzone d'amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti, Il Melangolo, Genova, 1999.

(4) The unity of the poets generally grouped together under this title, which might be translated as 'the new stylists', and which was coined retrospectively by Dante in the Commedia, has been seriously questioned in recent decades. It is used here to indicate very general trends in the lyric poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti in the 1280s and 1290s when they both held similar poetic preoccupations. In brief, these were, in the words of Forster and Boyde, 'the representation of the lover's condizione or stato in terms of a drama played out by the personified faculties of the lover's body and soul.' Kenelm Foster & Patrick Boyde (eds & trans.), Dante's Lyric Poetry, vol. 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967, 72. For a further discussion and bibliography the reader is directed to Fenzi.

(5) Federico De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Laterza, Bari, 1958, 49.

(6) The following words occur more frequently than spirito: cuore (85 times), amore (71), donna (52), dire (61), vedere (60), and the equally present morire/morte (45). Cino da Pistoia (1270-1336) used the term spirito 54 times, but his canzoniere is three times the length of Cavalcanti's.

(7) The first fourteen chapters of Dante's famous early work, The New Life, are commonly considered to represent the author's Cavalcantian phase, in which he was heavily influenced by his slightly older friend. For a further discussion of which see Foster & Boyde.

(8) Quoted in Gianfranco Contini, Poeti del duecento, vol. 2, Ricciardi, Milano, 1960, 497.

(9) Foster & Boyde, 80.

(10) The Italian term sbigottimento is used frequently by Cavalcanti to express the severe shock and bewilderment of the lover and his (for the lover in thirteenth-century Italian poetry was always male) incapacity to react, having experienced the force of love. The shock stuns the lover but there is also a sense of alarm and panic inherent in the word.

(11) The numbers in square brackets refer to the ordering of poems in Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, Domenico De Robertis (ed.), Einaudi, Torino, 1986, which is the edition quoted from throughout this article. The ordering is identical in Gianfranco Contini, Poeti del duecento. The most reliable English edition is that translated and edited by Lowry Nelson, The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, Garland, New York, 1986, which uses an identical ordering.

(12) The entire sonnet is as follows: 'Deh, spiriti miei, quando mi vedete / con tanta pena, come non mandate / fuor della mente parole adornate / di pianto, dolorose e sbigottite? // Deh, voi vedete che 'l core ha ferite / di sguardo e di piacer e d'umiltate: / deh, I' vi priego che voi 'l consolidate / che son da lui le sue vertu partite. // i' veggo a lui spirito apparire / alto e gentile e di tanto valore, / che fa le sue vertu tutte fuggire. // Deh, i' vi priego che deggiate dire / a l'alma trista, che parl'in dolore, / com'ella fu e fie sempre d'Amore.' ('Ah, my spirits, since you see me / In such suffering, and because you do not send forth / From my mind words embellished /With tears, sorrowful and dismayed, // Alas, you see that my heart has wounds / From looks and from beauty and from charity: / Alas, I beg you to give it consolation, / For its powers have forsaken it. // I see appear to it a spirit / Lofty and noble and of such strength / That it makes all its powers flee. // Alas, I beg you kindly to tell / My saddened soul, that speaks in sorrow, / How it was and always will be Love's.') Translation by Nelson, 8.

(13) 'In quello punto dico veracemente che lo spirito de la vita, lo quale dimora ne la secretissima camera de lo cuore, comincio a tremare si fortemente, che apparia ne li menimi polsi orribilmente; ...' ('At that point I say truthfully that the spirit of life, which dwells in the secret room of the heart, began to tremble so violently, that it appeared terrifying in its smallest veins'). Dante goes on to speak of all three of the spirits in turn. Vita Nuova, Chapter II, 4-7, in Dante Alighieri, Opere Minori, tomo 1, vol.1, Ricciardi, Milano, 1986.

(14) Translation by Foster & Boyde, 76-79.

(15) Translation by Nelson, 42-43.

(16) The four English versions are: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets, 1861, Anvil Press, London, 1981; Ezra Pound, The Translations of Ezra Pound, Faber & Faber, London, 1953; Nelson; and Marc Cirigliano, Guido Cavalcanti: The Complete Poems, Italica, New York, 1992.

(17) See: Convivio II, 1, for a definition of the four levels of meaning. Dante Alighieri, Opere Minori, tomo 1, vol. 2, Ricciardi, Milano, 1988.

(18) For a brief discussion of this point see: Contini, 'Esercizio d'interpretazione', 24.

(19) For a brief description of this concept see: Santa Casciani & Christopher Kleinhenz (trans. & eds), The Fiore and the Detto d'Amore, University of Notre Dame Press, Indianapolis, 2000, 109.

(20) While I would argue that the Commedia shows a much more complex relationship between poetry and meaning there are still examples where the metaphor of dressing the meaning is used: 'Aguzza qui, lettore ben li occhi al vero, / che 'l velo e ora ben tanto sottile, / certo che il trapassar dentro e leggero' ('Sharpen well your eye, here, reader to the truth, since the veil is now so fine that to pass within is easy'), Purgatorio VIII, 19-21; and: 'Veramente oramai saranno nude / le mie parole, quanto converrassi / quelle scovrire a la tua vista rude.' ('Truly now my words shall be as naked as may be necessary to make them plain to your rude sight', Purgatorio XXXIII, 100-102.

(21) Where, on the other hand, writer B uses writer A's work as an impetus to his/her own writing--that is, he or she gathers a meaning or a rhythm from a poem which he or she finds beautiful in itself and wants to reproduce, whether it was part of the author's original intention or not--then he or she has written an imitation or homage. It is in this zone that most poetic translations tend to fall as the writer renounces any attempt to fully comprehend the original text and/or be able to recreate it in a second language.

(22) Peter Porter, After Martial, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1972, ix.

SIMON WEST / ITALIAN STUDIES