Introduction
DGR's note to his translation
comments on the poem as yet another example of “these poets rating
one another for the want of constancy in love”. The translation's evident
connection to
<hi rend="i">The
Blessed Damozel</hi>
, however, underscores DGR's effort to
establish his own credentials of true constancy. In his case, however, the constancy
at stake is an aesthetic/cultural one—to the poetry his translations
mean to exalt and imitate. In an odd but very striking way, the “courteous
duty” that marks the modesty of a proper lover (and artist) gets far more
strongly realized in DGR's translation than in the original sonnet. DGR's note
underscores this difference by pointing out the contentious spirit that runs through
so much of the poetry he is translating. Compagni charges Cavalcanti with coarseness
as well as pride in trying to “draw the women from their balconies” instead
of trying to “mount upon a golden stair” to the elevated position of the lady. It
is much to the point that Compagni
associates Cavalcanti with “women” rather than with a single lady.
One final matter must be noted: DGR's use of the word “draw” in the
final line. Although it is questionable whether DGR, at this early point in his career,
consciously used this word in a double sense, he would later do so in a number of
remarkable cases and ways. See for example the crucial three-poem sequence in
“The
House of Life”
:
“Soul's
Beauty”
,
“Body's
Beauty”
, and
“The
Monochord”
.
DGR's source text, as he notes in
<hi rend="i">The
Early Italian Poets</hi>
(p. 217n), was Giovanni
Crescimbeni's
<hi rend="i">L'istoria
della volgar poesie</hi>
(first published in one volume in Rome, 1698 and subsequently expanded to 6 vols., and published in Venice in 1731, which was the edition DGR used.)