Foscolo, Alla Sera
Forse perché della fatal quïete
Tu sei l’immago a me sì cara, vieni,
O Sera! E quando ti corteggian liete
Le nubi estive e i zeffiri sereni,
E quando dal nevoso aere inquiete
Tenebre, e lunghe, all’universo meni,
Sempre scendi invocata, e le secrete
Vie del mio cor soavemente tieni.
Vagar mi fai co’ miei pensier su l’orme
Che vanno al nulla eterno; e intanto fugge
Questo reo tempo, e van con lui le torme
Delle cure, onde meco egli si strugge;
E mentre io guardo la tua pace, dorme
Quello spirto guerrier ch’entro mi rugge.
Poetic translation (pretty accurate):
Perhaps because of that fatal quiet
you are the image so dear to me, you come,
O Evening! And when happy summer clouds
and the gentle Zephyr are your escort,
and when from snowy restless air
you throw darkness, and long, into the universe,
you descend summoned always, and the secret
roads of my heart gently hold.
You make me wander with my thoughts on tracks
that vanish into eternal nothing; meanwhile flees
this cursed time, and with it, the throng
of worries with which it destroys with me itself;
and while I gaze on your peace, sleeps
that warlike spirit that within me roars.
✦
Foscolo, my dear love - in poetry only. My guy is wonderful when thoroughly confined to his standard eleven sillables, and starts to become obnoxiously verbose in anything longer than that.
Hope you'll forgive me for messing up the methrics in traslation; there's not much i can do about language, and i felt like the meaning was better to carry across than the rhythm. It is to be said that his adherence to the standard forms down to the rhyme - precise ABAB ABAB CDC DCD as it's usual for sonnets - really does add something to the poems. The mix of influences coming from both different art currents (neo classicism and romanticism, mainly) and direct cultures (italian, english, greek) comes in through the content as well as the form.
As his poems often do, this one talks of death, and contemplation of nature. A man pained with sorrows - it's Foscolo, so we're mostly looking at political turmoil, but classic romantic anguish and generic nostalgia are not excluded - takes peace in a quiet evening, taking in his own mortality (as it is death, in the end, that takes away everything). Even then, the poet isn't just sad, isn't abandoned to his own feelings: as every Just Soul would, a quiet anger simmers in his veins, waiting for the right moment.
There's something to be said, as always, on the mechanism phylosphy as a whole - even if it doesn't shine in this poem as well as others (go read De Sepolcri right now actually). Nature can be hard and cruel like it can be soft and summery, but it offers to all the peaceful rest of death, returning in Her. Many call it pessimism, but i personally can't see how being a smell little cog in the big machine of nature would be a bad thing - is it so cruel to be a being who's purpose in life is just to live, and be granted peace to any sorrows?
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Dice un proverbio sardo
che al diavolo non interessano le ossa
forse perché gli scheletri dànno una grande pace,
composti nelle teche o dentro scenari di deserto.
Amo il loro sorriso fatto solo di denti, il loro cranio,
la perfezione delle orbite, la mancanza di naso,
il vuoto intorno al sesso
e finalmente i peli, questi orpelli, volati dentro il nulla.
Non è gusto del macabro,
ma il realismo glabro dell’anatomia
lode dell’esattezza e del nitore.
Pensarci senza pelle rende buoni.
Per il paradiso forse non c’è strada migliore
che ritornare pietre, saperci senza cuore.
Antonella Anedda, Anatomia. Da Historiae, Einaudi, 2018.
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I heard that Antonia (Dante's daughter) became a nun. Sometimes I do wonder about the father-daughter relationship between them. Unfortunately sources on women in the medieval period are scarce.
yes she did. there are also not really much information about Iacopo, Pietro and Giovanni either (literally couldn't find a single word about giovanni except for the thing that he wasn't even dantes son and gemma just cheated). All we know is that Dante's children spent big parts of their lives in Ravenna where Dante was as well. Antonia was a baby when Dante was exiled and she only could meet him in the age of about 15 when she and her brothers were exiled too so i think it would be hard for them and the youngest to be in a close family relationship such as one between Iacopo and Dante probably (i just really really hope) were.
From Antonia's biography I got an impression that they indeed had warm relationship because she didn't move back to Florence meanwhile, from what i heard, her siblings did. or maybe she was just too dependent on her monastery that she couldn't leave
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I quoted to @littleshopofflorrors this wonderful poem by Giacomo Leopardi, and I was reminded of this film, one of the most beautiful I have seen in recent years. Elio Germano is an extraordinary actor, and to hear him perform La ginestra fills me with emotion ❤️
(You can find a good English translation here)
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