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Musa's rendition sings with the music of the sphere's--let no one fool you on that score. I doubt that these 366 little songs could suffer too badly at anyone's hands, but my money's with Musa in English.
Moving right along and back, what do we make of this? Time and again Petrarch tried to make these verses seem a vulgar trifle in the greater scheme of things. His actions give the lie to this. He revised them continually over the span of his life. They could not possibly be more polished.
His spiritual life stumbled upon this altar. He wrote as much to Augustine in his secret book.
One feels that his art about Laura impaired him far more than the real Laura ever did. What to make of this?
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If you want to find out what an obsessive love is truly like - here's the place to go. Petrarch fell in love with Laura on April 6, 1327 and obsesses about her for about fifty years. She was a married woman, living in the Avignon of the Popes. Her death, of the plague on April 6 (note the coincidence), 1348 did not end the fountain of poetry; Petrarch continued with the poems after her death.
This songbook is the source of the famed Petrarchan conceit, the farfetched comparison - for instance, that the beloved's eyes are like suns, dispensing warmth upon the lover (or cold when she is chilly). Later, the Elizabethan poets imitated these conceits. Even Shakespeare has a go at satirizing them.
Enjoy this fabulous poetry.
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Yet one must remeber that this is not a critical edition. Durlings commentary (if one can call it that) leaves much to be desired. Suprising also is the fact that Durling completely ignores the division in two parts (traditionally called "in life", 1-263 and "in death" 264-366. Petrarch clearly intended there to be a division, leaving blank pages in the Vatican manuscript, Vat. Lat. 3195. For those who desire a critical edition I would recomend Marco Santagata's 1996 edition (Mondadori), however it is entirely in Italian.
Yet one must remeber that this is not a critical edition. Durlings commentary (if one can call it that) leaves much to be desired. Suprising also is the fact that Durling completely ignores the division in two parts (traditionally called "in life", 1-263 and "in death" 264-366. Petrarch clearly intended there to be a division, leaving blank pages in the Vatican manuscript, Vat. Lat. 3195. For those who desire a critical edition I would recomend Marco Santagata's 1996 edition (Mondadori), however it is entirely in Italian.
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