Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works (Oxford World's Classics)

This is exactly the book my daughter needed for her college class, EXACTLY! But without paying the huge markup at the college bookstore.

Part of our cultural heritage

how can you not love Petrarch. He is sublime and so very representative of all the tugs and pulls of the spiritual, the carnal, the intellectual and the poetic. I always loved Dante, but Petrarch spoke to me in a way that Dante never did.

Lovely little book. Not dual language, but Musa has nice verse.

This slim volume in the Oxford World's Classics series does seem to be a little overpriced by the publisher. Thankfully Amazon has other ideas! Edited by Professor Mark Musa, his ten-page introduction provides the reader with a concise description of Petrarch's life and works. (Surprisingly for a work from such a reputable publishing house, there are some typological errors in some of the dates.) A brief chronology and a bibliography are also provided.Musa explains how Petrarch was viewed by his contemporaries as a second Virgil, but more for his epic Latin poetry than for the `Canzoniere' itself. Musa touches upon the theme of the eternal Laura (Petrarch's equivalent of Dante's Beatrice), the supposed subject of many of the love poems in his `Canzoniere.' But, writes Musa, "who Laura was ... is not important, since such information does not provide us with a better understanding". This may sound surprising, but Musa's argument is that, "The reader of the Canzoniere ... is not long into the poems before he or she realizes that Laura is not the main subject of the work. Petrarch himself is its subject and centre, and the work itself is his own psychological notebook." He goes on to claim that, "It was the poetry of the Canzoniere that appealed to love poets all over Europe because it represented self-analysis and introspection at the most sophisticated level."I am by no means an expert in fourteenth-century Italian poetry, but for those reading this review who are, I should point out some important points that Musa makes about his own translation for this volume. Musa says that Petrarch strove to use language that represented what he was trying to say or the mood in which he was trying to convey it. Musa says he has tried hard to maintain this standard, "never to sacrifice the movement and meaning of the verse to the tyranny of rhyme ... In short, I have tried to be faithful to the poem's meaning without being too literal, and faithful to its sound and music without being archaic or restricting myself to a formal rhyme scheme."A total of forty-three poems are represented here out of well over three hundred in all. In number 151, Petrarch writes how "in her fair eyes I read there word by word all that I say of love and all I write", but the selections chosen cover not just love, but politics as well (for example no.128) and Petrarch's inveighing against the Papal Court, then at Avignon (no.136).In addition, this volume includes Petrarch's `Letter to Posterity' and his `The Ascent of Mount Ventoux'. And I admit that it was the prospect of ascending the celebrated mountain that at first drew me to this slim volume, read as my train flew like an arrow through the Burgundian countryside between London and Avignon. But I am glad that I had the chance also to read the selections from the `Canzoniere', for I found much truth inside them: "Life runs away and never rests a moment and death runs after it with mighty stride."