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Luca Manini, Amoretti
by Giulio Pertile

Manini, Luca. Amoretti. Milano: Bompiani, 2014. 173 pp. ISBN: 978-8845275456. €8.5 paper.
[This book is available on www.amazon.it —Ed]

It should come as no surprise that Spenser’s Amoretti sound good in Italian, though one could hardly demand better confirmation than Luca Manini’s translations. His Amoretti, which joins his La Regina delle Fate (Bompiani, 2012), reproduces in its entirety the 1595 Ponsonby volume, thus including not only the Amoretti but also Spenser’s “Anacreontics” as well as his Epithalamion (Manini proves very aware, in his lengthy introduction, of the logic behind that ordering). His versions, printed alongside the English in an en face edition, are elegant, readable, and at times profoundly musical; throughout they are faithful to the lightness of the original poems, which, composed self-consciously as a respite from The Faerie Queene and lacking the intellectual complexity of Sidney or Shakespeare’s sequences, attain instead a light, drifting, nearly diaphanous melancholy.

The irony attendant here on “the task of the translator” goes almost without saying. Since the Amoretti is Spenser’s most explicitly Italianate work, and since many of the sonnets are themselves partial translations of Italian and French exemplars, the act of translating them “back” into Italian can resemble that of Penelope as she unweaves by night what she has woven by day. It runs the risk of leaving us, if not exactly with nothing, then with poems that inevitably approximate many of those which Spenser started with, and thus of undoing those essential moments where the Amoretti go beyond faithful importation of the Italian idiom and arrive at an authentically English Petrarchism. “Hart-thrilling eies” (12) is hardly Spenser’s most impressive effect, but to read Manini’s translation, in which it becomes an entire clause, is to realize just how hard-won these Anglo-Saxon turns must have felt: “gli occhi suoi che straziano il mio cuore.” And yet elsewhere, the Amoretti themselves sound like translations of Manini. “Then came the waves and washed it away,” from one of Spenser’s most famous sonnets (75), reads uncannily well as a somewhat halting attempt to capture in English the brilliant euphony of Manini’s “venner le onde a dilavarlo via.” Perhaps, then, we should understand Manini’s work less as a translation and more as a kind of implicit commentary on linguistic incommensurability, for however close the two versions may come in meaning, the best one can do with the sounds, tones, and diction of each is to realize, by juxtaposing them, just how different are the intrinsic resources of these two languages.

Manini’s versions are in hendecasyllables, the eleven-syllable line, usually with a stress on the fourth or sixth and the tenth syllables, which is standard for Italian sonnets and from which Manini elicits a great range of sonic and tonal effects (with the exception of a few couplets, he wisely does not attempt to translate the unusual ababbcbccdcdee rhyme scheme of the Amoretti). Although the hendecasyllable is one syllable longer than the iambic pentameter, since Italian is more naturally polysyllabic than English it can in practice feel more constraining, more like the equivalent of an eight- or nine-beat line in English. Manini is thus forced to cull (some might argue for the better) many of Spenser’s most characteristic rhetorical effects; thus, for example, “Faire proud now tell me why should faire be proud” (27) becomes “Ditemi, bella, perché siete altera?”—a different question—and thus the ambiguity of “that light / the which was wont to lead my thoughts astray” (88) is lost in “che sì guidava i miei pensieri erranti.” But what saves Manini’s hendecasyllables from consistent simplification is his artful use of adverbs and gerunds, often more lyrical in Italian than their English counterparts, to convey into Italian the nuances of Spenserian syntax and description. In, for example, Manini’s translation of Amoretti 13 (where “goodly temperature,” in the fourth line, is simply impossible in Italian) the last line, “such lowliness shall make you lofty be,” comes through perfectly as “rendendovi, cedendo, celestiale.” Manini has captured the highly Christian paradox of “lowlinesse” and “lofty,” but he has done so with an entirely Italianized syntax, and with a Latinate diction that corresponds nicely to Spenser’s Anglo-Saxon. The gerund allows Manini to place “cedendo” (“yielding”) in a metrical position which fully enacts its meaning and connects it both to “rendendovi” and to “celestiale.” Such moments in his Amoretti are too numerous to list, but here are a few of the more striking instances in which Manini has almost miraculously rendered not only the sense but also the sound of Spenser’s strange English: “agli occhi suoi sereni rasserena” (“with that sunshine when cloudy looks are cleared,” 40); “sì saldamente e nel suo saldo core” (“unto her selfe and setled so in hart,” 59); “irraggerà nel mondo che s’imbuia” (“into the glooming world his gladsome ray,” 62); “le ali lor vogliose dispiegando” (“they loosely did theyr wanton wings display,” 76). With this last line, as with “lievi legioni d’amoretti alati” (“legions of loves with little wings did fly,” 16), Manini again seems to have struck upon a lost Italian original whose fluidity Spenser himself, we might imagine, was attempting to recreate.

At times Manini’s euphony comes at the expense of the original’s complexity. For example the poet’s comparison of himself (in 35 and 83) to Narcissus—“whose eyes him starved: so plenty makes me poore”—is translated as the perfectly assonant line, “stupito sento il tanto troppo poco,” but here the emphasis on sonic translation has diluted the line’s paradoxical quality as well as its overt allusion to the Metamorphoses (“inopem me copia fecit”). “Sudden dumps of dreary sad disdaine,” which Manini simplifies to “triste sdegno,” was probably impossible, and some of Spenser’s most characteristic ambiguities (“living prayses dead” becomes simply “fama imperitura” in 33, and indeed much of Spenser’s play with “life,” “lively” and “like” is lost) simply do not register in the Italian; here one might wish that Manini had pushed a bit further, since he acquits himself so well elsewhere. Even in its more subdued moments, however, Manini’s translation calls attention to Spenser’s style, grounded as it was in both imitation and idiosyncrasy, and sets off its most distinctive traits.

Manini has also paid close attention to the problem of diction; his Amoretti draws in equal parts on conventional Petrarchan idioms, on mainstream contemporary Italian, and on a more learned and rarefied vocabulary to render Spenser’s own hybrid language. The voce colta in particular can add a great deal of texture and subtlety to what might otherwise be a humdrum version; for example “the paynefull smith” of 32 becomes “il fabbro acribe,” drawing on a Greek root (akribeia) for a neologism which Spenser would no doubt have endorsed, while “scoria” (“non è che scoria la mondana gloria”), again from the Greek, seems a perfect equivalent for the resolutely Anglo-Saxon “drosse uncleane” in 27. The rare “inferia” (48), meanwhile, is a Latinism which goes well beyond Spenser’s “sacrifize unto the greedy fire,” yet it captures something of the archaic, ritualistic quality such metaphors have in the sequence. At the same time, at the appropriate moments Manini translates Spenser’s sometimes overly correct constructions into a more spritely and modern idiom, often using colons. In 70, “Make hast therefore sweet love, whilest it is prime” becomes the more urgent “Affrettati, mio amore: è primavera” while in 89, the final sonnet, he has “Nulla di ciò che vive sotto il cielo / mi conforta: solo rivederla,” where the asyndeton seems a fitting rendition of the emotional heightening we get in this concluding poem. The more paratactic style of the Epithalamion, as well as the greater freedom of the “Anacreontics,” are likewise served well by Manini’s graceful, fluid style; his version of Spenser’s stately marriage hymn is particularly fine. With its freer syntactical framework and trimeter pivots, the Epithalamion, an Anglicized canzone, allows Spenser’s own lines to become less rigid and less dense, and thus Manini has an easier time capturing the convergence of sound and sense (though “e vi risponderanno i boschi riecheggiando” is perhaps a little ponderous for the refrain). Indeed Italian is in some ways better adapted than English to the joyous solemnity which Spenser attempts, with light irony, to evoke, and it is not hard to hear in Manini’s own version overtones of a pastoral celebration in the Roman campagna.

These are, on the whole, satisfying and felicitous translations; if a handful feel slightly mechanical, or overdetermined by their Petrarchan originals, in most Manini has managed to capture both the mood and spirit of the originals while at the same time finding attractive equivalents for their frequent linguistic eccentricities. For Italian readers, this version offers new access to this most Italophile of English poets, as well as to an important chapter in the long and varied career of Petrarchan poetry in English. On this last subject, Manini’s lengthy and detailed introduction is very valuable for English readers as well; his knowledge of figures such as Tebaldeo and Serafino, largely forgotten outside of Italian contexts, brings renewed insight to the question of the Amoretti’s genealogy. For English readers, meanwhile, the translation offers a particularly acute sense of the challenges Spenser faced as the poet most determined to bring Italian and French into English and yet most aware of English’s many rebarbative pockets. As, with Milton’s lines, we often imagine a shadowy Latin hexameter hovering behind the English original in Milton’s mind, so with Spenser and Italian hendecasyllables; into that glooming world of reading and rereading, of absorption and imitation, of translation and transformation that formed the worktable for Spenser’s poems—now largely a matter for conjecture—Manini has shone a gladsome ray indeed. 

Giulio Pertile
Visiting Assistant Professor
Claremont McKenna College

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44.3.59

Cite as:

Giulio Pertile, "Luca Manini, Amoretti," Spenser Review 44.3.59 (Winter 2015). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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