Canzoniere by Petrarch. Translated by A. M. Juster. Liveright. 2026.
Reviewed by Eric Bies
The life of the towering Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch, was long and fruitful. It was also, from time to time, splendidly serendipitous: probably no moment in the childhood of a poet has matched, or ever will match, the portent of his meeting with Dante (a friend of his father’s) at just seven years old. Having buried both his parents by 22, Petrarch embarked upon the ecclesiastical career that would prove so congenial to a literary life. Along the way, he managed to amass the largest private library in Europe. In Verona, he recovered a long-lost manuscript of the Roman senator Cicero’s private letters. We call him the Father of Humanism with good reason, and the list of those reasons – including the decision, unthinkable at the time, to climb a mountain simply to enjoy the view from its summit – goes on at great length. But there is no Petrarch – no point discussing his life and work, at least – without Laura, the woman with whom he fell instantly and inescapably in love. It was (he tells us) Good Friday, April 6, 1327, at the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon in France, when he first set eyes on her. One look was all it took. The hundreds of poems that her unattainable beauty and virtue inspired – most of them sonnets of the sort to spark a renaissance for the form in the England of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser – eventually gave rise to the bold-faced adjective which, at this late juncture, unjustly eclipses the poet.
The 366 poems that comprise his masterpiece, the Canzoniere (or “Songbook”) – not just sonnets but canzoni, sestinas, ballads, and madrigals – are all properly Petrarchan, but the very word has somehow seemed sufficient for far too long. What do we miss when we resign ourselves to “Dickensian,” “Kafkaesque,” or (Zeus help us) “Homeric”?
Oodles and oodles, it turns out. Yet the situation with Petrarch is unique. As opposed to Dickens, Kafka, Homer, and the rest, virtually no one in the English-speaking world reads, let alone sings, Petrarch’s songs anymore.
Or precious few do: independent scholars, beleaguered academics, whatever the opposite of the “general reader” is. As long as his words persist in published form, a Petrarchan revival will remain within reach, but let’s not fool ourselves. Until the schools decide his Canzoniere worth teaching – ideally assigning the whole daunting thing – Petrarch’s poems are bound to remain overlooked. And why not? We teach Leaves of Grass, don’t we? Whitman’s great book is hardly the world’s first uncommonly candid, intensely mythogenic self-portrait in verse.
So call your local school board, or whoever pulls such strings, and alert them to the precedent of the thing. Alert them, moreover, to an especially recent reason for paying Petrarch any portion of their much-divided attention: that is, the publication of A. M. Juster’s magnificent new translation of the complete Canzoniere.
We’ll be lucky if we get to say the same of some future translation. As things stand, English readers have probably never been better situated to enjoy Petrarch’s poems. Not that we’ve lacked for English renditions. On the contrary, every century since Petrarch’s own can lay claim to its own fair share of attempts; even Queen Elizabeth I seems to have found the challenge irresistible. Yet no single translator before Juster has managed to retain the dazzling range of rhyme, music, meter, and wordplay present in the original poems. No translator has ever been, perhaps, as madly committed to the task. Consider Sonnet 18 in Petrarch’s Italian.
Quand’io son tutto vòlto in quella parte
ove ’l bel viso di madonna luce,
et m’è rimasa nel pensier la luce
che m’arde et strugge dentro a parte a parte,
i’ che temo del cor che mi si parte,
et veggio presso il fin de la mia luce,
vommene in guisa d’orbo, senza luce,
che non sa ove si vada et pur si parte.
Cosí davanti ai colpi de la morte
fuggo: ma non sí ratto che ’l desio
meco non venga come venir sòle.
Tacito vo, ché le parole morte
farian pianger la gente; et i’ desio
che le lagrime mie si spargan sole.
Can’t read Italian? No problem. Even the most hopeless of monoglots (this reviewer included) can’t help hearing the rhymes in a foreign language, especially when they’re as obvious as these, the same five words – parte, luce, morte, desio, sole – patterned into a poem about sameness itself: the apparently endless, restless, doomed loop of yearning for Laura. Now, watch Juster match that verbal intensity line for line.
When I return to focus on the part of town illuminated by the light of her bright face, I sense remains of light that melt, then slowly sear me part by part, and since I fear my heart, which breaks apart, and peer each day through ever-dimming light, I plod like someone lost and blind to light who nonetheless resolves that he must part, and so I flee before the mortal fight, although not so rapidly, for even still desire comes with me, as is its wont. I do not speak, for people would not fight back tears if they could hear my words fall still, and tears I shed alone are what I want.
Umberto Eco famously described translation as “the art of failure.” It doesn’t take a doctorate in semiotics to understand that one language can never be another, but the formulation helps explain why translators so often seem forced to choose between capturing the sound or the sense of their source material, and not both. It would be churlish to suppose that something isn’t often gained in either case. Thoughtful translation is as much a negotiation of limitations as it is of possibilities. But lest we equivocate and miss the point here … those who do both are a real rarity.
Which is why Juster’s own knack for achieving that ideal is worth the recognition. To have struck so many balances among so many aesthetic obligations and still given us, in the end, a Petrarch as frequently readable as any major poet alive today? It’s nearly unheard of. Of course, Sonnet 18 isn’t the only place that Juster wows.
It may appear to some the way I idolize
the one I worship on the Earth, is my mistake
for setting her above the others as I make
her out as saintly, fair, enchanting, chaste and wise.
I think the opposite is true, and agonize
that she might be upset at my too modest take,
that loftier and finer praise should be at stake –
and for the doubters, let them look with their own eyes,
so that one will declare, “It is this man’s desire
Athens, Arpinum, Mantua and Smyrna be
exhausted, plus one lyre and another lyre.”
No mortal tongue extends to her divinity;
Love pokes his own and pulls it back to glorify her –
and not from his own choice, but from his destiny.
“Desire,” “lyre,” “glorify her”: Petrarch might be Laura-crazed, but one-sided love is far from the poet’s only theme. Death rears its ungainly head, as well, and many careful readers have detected an organizing principle in it, a before and an after: the poems composed while Laura was alive, and those that were when she wasn’t. At some point you can’t help wondering: Who was this Laura, exactly? One compelling line of evidence points to the historical figure of Laura de Noves. The signorina became Laura de Sade after marrying a distant ancestor of the sadistic Marquise, whose eleven children she bore before dying of the plague on April 6, 1348, exactly twenty years after Petrarch’s momentous first glance in the church at Avignon.
Appetizing conjectures just like these abound in the literature. The book’s introduction cannily arranges the fruit of such studies in a sumptuous buffet of biographical, historical, and critical commentary that is worth the price of admission alone. And the intro’s author, Andrew Frisardi, is a very rare beast indeed. A genial scholar of unquestionable erudition, his eagerness to be useful means his learning never gets in the way of his lucid prose, which informs as it incites. Consider his insight into the “liturgical-calendrical structure” of the Canzoniere.
There are 366 poems in the Canzoniere, the first a retrospective and penitent preface, the remaining 365 the equivalent number of the days in a year. Some have noted that 1348, the terrible year of the plague, was a leap year, so all 366 poems would count as days. It has been said that the number 6 is to the Canzoniere what the number 3 is to Dante’s Commedia (which is composed of three major parts, three-line stanzas, etc.). Using standard numerological method, the sum of 3 + 6 + 6 = 15, and 1 and 5 add up to 6 again; Laura’s name in Latin, Laurea, has six letters; and so on.
The emotional fluctuations of the poems – from adoration to despair to self-reproach and back – may seem at odds with the notion of any such grand design, numerological or otherwise. But Frisardi’s generous readings of the poems, including a spirited discussion of the poet’s literary precedents, leave no doubt about the supreme degree of control Petrarch exercised over his material. In a letter to Boccaccio, he writes that “a poet’s use of literary tradition is ‘not gathering flowers, but is changing them into honey.’” When T. S. Eliot pronounced the same sentiment six centuries later – that mature poets steal, transforming their thefts into “something better” – he, too, was making more than a critical assertion. Both men were self-describing. Flowers, of course, don’t make honey. But neither, strictly speaking, does Italian make English, and yet here we are.
It’s hard to imagine a better, more vital, more vividly realized new edition of this landmark work. In addition to the poems themselves, a translator’s note, and Frisardi’s fine essay, Juster includes a glossary of poetic terms, historical figures, mythological allusions, and Petrarchan symbols. For a more intimate understanding of the individual poems, a solid base of endnotes offer ample wonkish headway. In what amounts to something of a shock, however, this edition notably excludes the Canzoniere’s original 366 poems. Readers wishing to perform spontaneous comparisons of Petrarch’s Italian to Juster’s English – and this review attempts, in admittedly limited form, to indicate the worthiness of doing just that – will find themselves somewhat hamstrung in the act. Perhaps an utterly complete version, not a poem missing, would have proved unwieldy. Most readers, maybe, won’t miss them too much. The first step, anyway, toward making Petrarch popular again is simply sitting down and reading him, and enjoying him. And Juster’s more than got you covered.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.