The translation is an altogether brilliant performance
exactly because of its fastidious pursuit of the technical features of
Guinizelli's canzone. DGR's rhyme scheme adheres to the coblas
capfinidas of the famous original. Equally impressive
is the prosodic equivalent that DGR creates for the hendecasyllables
and setenarii: the stress of DGR's iambs
(pentameter and trimeter) is markedly reduced by his resort to a simple lexicon, with
many rhythmic units comprised of
or dominated by a series of one syllable words. Finally,
the conscious deployment, here and throughout DGR's translations, of a
slightly antique lexicon controls the poem's moments of semantic freedom. They
come to seem DGR's deliberate effort to recreate for himself, in a very different
set of social circumstances, a poetic equivalent for a difficult and disappeared
artistic sensibility.
As with nearly all of these translations, we don't know precisely when DGR made this one. Because it is such a famous and important poem in the tradition that DGR's translations are exposing, it was certainly translated very early, perhaps as early as 1846.
The translation was first published in 1861 in
DGR based his translation on the original printed in
Urbano Lapredi's