For the fifth time, volunteers in our remote Denman Island community organized and presented a week-long baroque music workshop and festival. This time we focussed mostly on madrigals composed by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), including a short opera meant to flatter a duke. I put together a slide show of surtitles with translations so the audience could better understand what was going on. Apart from hearing music rarely ever performed, another take-away for me was to encounter for the first time Francisco Petrarch’s poetry from the early Renaissance. The literal translations I projected fell short and are not worth revisiting. In one case, I found Petrarch’s sonnet, Vago Augeletto, was better translated by the 19th century American poet, Richard Henry Wilde. Note how Wilde employs sonnet form, as did Shakespeare in his sonnets. Petrarch’s poetry is clearly a door I will seek to open as I learn more Italian.
Vago augelletto, che candando vai
Thou sweet sad warbler! in thine airy flight
Sing’st thou of Love and Summer’s vanished hours
When coming Winter now, and falling Night
Sadden the day and strip the fading bowers?
Since thus thy little heart, by ills opprest,
Its sorrow speaks, my kindred grief it knows,
Come then! and sheltered in this lonely breast
Together let us tell our mutual woes.
I know not whether our hard fate’s the same,
She thou bewail’st perhaps still lingers here,
Heaven’s will I mourn, and Death’s unerring aim —
While fading twilight and the dying year
So many sweet and bitter memories claim
That song for song I give thee, tear for tear!