Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Journal of Italian Translation
awkward. Equally challenging is the skill in which the poet utilizes
the word root, which is initially planted in the sonnet with
“selvose” (line 1) and “selve” (line 10), to neatly tie the final line to
the previous stanzas. Unable to find a suitable way to recreate this
word-play, I decided on a repetition of sound within the terzine to
tie together the sights and movements, or “career” of the animals,
to the sounds or “choirs” of birdsong reaching the “ear” of the
poet—the simultaneous experience of which causes an abrupt
plunge/disappearance/transformation of speaker into forest. This
sonnet represents a remarkable example of Turini Bufalini’s deep
appreciation of the natural environment.
The two madrigals selected here for translation reflect other
themes central to the poet’s work. In “Sopra l’amore materno,”
Francesca expresses regret that the love she holds for her son does
not result in a reciprocal bond. The second madrigal (untitled)
describes her struggle to renounce earthly loves in order to seek a
contemplative life.
As a poetic form, the madrigal 4 allows a freer structure than
that of the sonnet in granting the poet liberty to intersperse hendecasyllabic
lines with those of seven syllables in no fixed pattern;
the only hard-and-fast rules being to produce a rhyming end couplet
and a total number of lines less than those of the sonnet (that
is, less than 14 lines). Since the Italian madrigal is monostrophic
(one stanza only), the end-rhyme of the final couplet seems to me
to affect the tone of the poem as a whole, reverberating its final
ring of closure in a formal summing up of the emotions expressed.
I therefore sought a formal vocabulary for my English translations.
Where I could not reproduce the eleven syllable and seven syllable
lines of the original, I substituted lines of ten and eight syllables
respectively. In this way, and by retaining the end-rhyme patterns
of the originals, I hoped to reproduce the form’s overall musicality.
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