Giulia Drago
on translating Gaspara Stampa
Stampa’s sonnet reads to present-day Italian ears as a combination of the utmost concentration of meaning with surprising linguistic ease. Though the language is, overall, unmistakably archaic, the rhyme scheme sounds as rhythmic as a bell, often punctuating words that feel simple and current; they read like logical keywords of a poetic manifesto.
The text grounds a declaration of artistic mastery in the exceptionality of its object – of the experience of love that the entire collection aims to portray. The first quatrain opens onto the limitless horizons of a literary canon past, present, and future (possibly multilingual: paesi diversi, or "lands diverse"), only to be met with the second quatrain’s denial that anyone else but Stampa could write about what she is describing. It is a love exceeding the Petrarchan referential frame both in pain and in pleasure(as the first tercet reveals). The poetic voice implicitly invokes the most current poetic tradition, and though respecting its form(and partly its lexicon), it uses it to declare its own creative overcoming of it.
All the aspects I mentioned earlier are encapsulated in the extraordinary verse Non vi dolete dunque di patire: Stampa uses two near-synonyms, which both mean to suffer (dolersi, patire), to say (in Jane Tylus’s masterful 2010 translation): "don’t ever regret that you suffer so." The love-pains so central in Petrarchan poetry are here compared to the physical pain of the legendarily gruesome deaths of Catholic saints, not just to achieve a conceit that rewrites Petrarchan topoi into a Baroque conceit, reminiscent of John Donne, on the deeply physical nature of love’s anguish, but also vindicating its dignity. As the first sonnet in the collection suggests, the canonisation of these saints might come from the achievement of being able to write exceptional poetry: art as the crowning glory of life.
about the author
Gaspara Stampa (~1523-1554) was a poet. Historical sources describe her as a talented singer and musician. Though only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime, her Canzoniere, a collection of 310 sonnets, was given to the press by her sister Cassandra in 1554, six months after Gaspara’s death.
Gaspara Stampa’s artistic activity intersects with wider trends of the Italian XVI century – an emerging tradition of women writing poetry, as well as a much wider movement of intellectuals engaging with the Petrarchan tradition. Francesco Petrarca had founded a poetic sensibility based on a rich, often spiritualised meditation on the experience of love; the dominant move in XVI-century Italian poetry was precisely a rewriting of Petrarch, whose legacy was creatively spun by each poet into different individual threads.
Stampa’s intervention in the movement has long been read as unconventionally centered on physical, tormented love. After almost two hundred years of relative oblivion, her collection was rediscovered in 1738 and re-edited in the light of a largely biographical interpretation – as the faithful record of her relationship with Count Collaltino da Collalto. More recent critical trends have attempted to overcome a purely biographical reading, underlining instead the intellectual dimension of her engagement with Petrarch’s legacy and contemporary culture.
about the translator
Giulia Drago is a PhD student in English linguistics at La Sapienza University in Rome. She is currently studying early modern ideas about language from the vantage point of rogue books: Renaissance guides to the (possibly imaginary) secret language of thieves and tricksters.
