Perhaps the most important feature of this sonnet is its rhetorical structure,
which withholds until line 14 the crucial fact that the sonnet is spoken by Dante's
heart. The text's prose introduction (in Chapter XXXVII) explicates that structure
as Dante's effort to ensure “that this inward strife which I had undergone might not
be hidden from all save the miserable wretch who endured it”. The sonnet, in other
words, dramatizes Dante's conscious effort to gain a clear intellectual view of his
own confused experience. That effort gets thoroughly displayed in the following
Chapter XXXVIII, which moves through a long passage of self-searching prose to
culminate in the sonnet
Lines 9-11 of DGR's text are especially notable for their interpretive clarity.
“A lady greets me with her eyes”, not exactly
rendering Dante's “una donna che vi mira”
(line 11), serves Dante by serving DGR's poem: the phrase calls back to the
“eyes” of lines 2 and 4, thus making us aware of an unbroken and sympathetic
company, of whom the Donna is one. The problem is that the order of Dante's
being has been disturbed: whereas Dante's mortal parts, like his eyes, should
register their mortal griefs, his higher functions should maintain a spiritual
confidence. But in this episode with the Donna the poet has watched the
“fickleness” of his eyes
“betray/ My mind to fears” (lines 9-10). Overgoing
Dante's text with the word “mind”, DGR's unliteral translation proves thereby
more deeply faithful to Dante's ragionamento.
It must be pointed out, however, that DGR's rendering of Dante's argument
clearly assigns to the “heart” a greater power of consciousness and spiritual
authority than is present in Dante's texts. That difference is even more apparent in
the next sections, Chapter XXXVIII- XXXIX. In DGR's sonnet
One other matter requires comment. In Chapter XXXIX Dante refers to this
erotic appetency as “malvagio desiderio” (“evil
desire”). But DGR's benevolent interpretation is difficult to resist entirely.
As a result, the translation is riven with a clear contradiction, and in DGR's work
that contradiction will be further explicated and explored in the second coming, as it
were, of Dante's autobiography in DGR's life and work: that is to say, in
Convivio
DGR's source text was
“L'amaro lagrimar che voi faceste” in the third volume of Fraticelli's
Opere
Minori di Dante Alighieri
An early work, late 1840s.
The translation was first published in 1861 in
The
Early Italian Poets
Dante
and his Circle
Early Italian Poets)Dante's Lyric Poetry