Samantha Pious
on translating La Compiuta Donzella
I first encountered La Compiuta Donzella a year or two ago, when I was first learning Italian, in a historical anthology of medieval and early modern literature. As a woman translator, I have always found it convenient to assume female authorship unless otherwise specified. I made no exception while reading and rewriting the sonnets of La Compiuta Donzella. Even knowing, as a student of medieval literature, that medieval poets and writers tend toward self-camouflage rather than self-revelation, I persisted in reading her poems autobiographically — or semi-autobiographically, at least.
My translations of La Compiuta Donzella’s sonnets do not follow a literal phrase-by-phrase procedure, nor are they conventionally literary verse renderings. Instead, inspired by Caroline Bergvall’s Chaucerian re-visions in Meddle English, I opted for a sort of poetic archaeology, digging up buried idioms and lost meanings that were once common to the English and Italian vernaculars. At a practical level, this has entailed amplifying key words and abbreviating various others, as well as a certain amount of free association. I hope that parts of these translations will sound familiar to readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and anonymous early modern English and Scottish balladry.
The versions of the original texts reproduced here are drawn from Gianfranco Contini’s anthology Poeti del Duecento: Poesia cortese toscana e settentrionale (1960).
about the author
If she truly existed, (La) Compiuta Donzella was a thirteenth-century Italian poet who was the first woman to have written poetry in the Italian vernacular. However, some theorize that the poet was simply a creation of male poets, as there are no records of her existence other than her three sonnets. In this piece, she writes about her life and how she was torn between becoming a nun and succumbing to her father’s wishes to marry a man her father had chosen for her.
about the translator
Samantha Pious is a graduate student in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015), offers a selection of the French poetry of Renée Vivien in English translation. Some of her other translations and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Mezzo Cammin, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and other publications.
