Sonnets and Shorter Poems

In this volume, David R. Slavitt, the distinguished translator and author of more than one hundred works of fiction, poetry, and drama, turns his skills to Il Canzoniere (Songbook) by Petrarch, the most influential poet in the history of the sonnet. In Petrarchs hands, lyric verse was transformed from an expression of courtly devotion into a way of conversing with ones own heart and mind. Slavitt renders the sonnets in Il Canzoniere, along with the shorter madrigals and ballate, in a sparkling and engaging idiom and in rhythm and rhyme that do justice to Petrarchs achievement. At the center of Il Canzoniere (also known as Rime Sparse, or Scattered Rhymes) is Petrarchs obsessive love for Laura, a woman Petrarch asserts he first saw at Easter Mass on April 6, 1327, in the church of Sainte-Claire dAvignon when he was twenty-two. Though Laura was already married, the sight of her woke in the poet a passion that would last beyond her premature death on April 6, 1348, exactly twenty-one years after he first encountered her. Unlike Dantes Beatricea savior leading the poet by the hand toward divine lovePetrarchs Laura elicits more earthbound and erotic feelings. David Slavitts deft new translation captures the nuanced tone of Petrarchs poemstheir joy and despair, and eventually their grief over Lauras death. Readers of poetry and especially those with an interest in the sonnet and its history will welcome this volume.