Note: this post begins a series about Italian madrigal poems and their translations, a preview of an upcoming reading/recital at the Berkeley Early Music Festival, Wednesday June 10, 2 pm, at the University Lutheran Chapel.
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One of the most popular madrigal poems of the 16th century was “Cruda Amarilli” (cruel Amaryllis), by the Ferrarese diplomat and poet Giovanni Battista Guarini. The poem circulated widely across Europe: at least 22 musical settings of it were published between 1590 and 1626, including one in Dresden.
Broadly speaking, the poem is a Petrarchan complaint: that is, an offshoot of the centuries-old convention derived from the Canzoniere of Petrarch, in which a lover complains of the indifference, or “cruelty,” of the beloved one. Here’s the poem in Italian (I’ll get to a translation soon):
Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora
d’amar; ahi lasso, amaramente insegni
Amarilli del candido ligustro
più candida, e più bella,
ma de l’Aspido sordo
e più sorda, e più fera, e più fugace;
poi che col dir t’offendo
i’ mi morrò tacendo.
In the madrigal genre, poetic lines alternated between long (11 syllables) and short (7 syllables); here, the long lines are left-justified and the short ones are indented. By the way, if you’re counting syllables in Italian, you have to know that when a vowel ends a word and the next word begins with a vowel, the two are elided—they count as one syllable (as in the very first phrase, “Cruda Amarilli,” pronounced “crud’amarilli”).
“Amarilli” here is a conventional name for a beloved, derived from the related convention that love flourished best in a pastoral setting: even though the poets were courtiers, they imagined themselves as shepherds in an idyllic landscape, wooing lovely young nymphs whose names derived from Greek poetry. It’s not the flower we know by that name, though the flower name is related to the pastoral myths.
So the pun: the poet begins by saying that his beloved, “cruel Amaryllis,” has a bitter name. What does he mean? The word “amaryllis” derives from the Greek for “sparkling” — a far cry from “bitter.” But notice how often the syllable “amar” occurs in the first lines of the poem:
Amarilli . . . amar . . . amaramente . . . (and again) . . . Amarilli: Amarillis is amar, bitter.
I have been translating madrigals like these for a number of years (this and 149 others by Guarini are translated and discussed in my book, A Poetry Precise and Free). How to convey this Italian pun in English? One could change the name of the beloved, but that would take the poem too far from its history and legacy in the musical compositions based on it.
My solution was to keep the syllable “mar” but to use its English sense of damaging, hurting. Here’s my translation:
Harsh Amaryllis, aptly named,
alas, you “mar” me cruelly.
You’re far more beautiful
than daffodils,
but you’re as wild
and heartless as a rattlesnake.
I’ll not mess with you:
I’ll hold my peace and die.
Hear the translation read aloud.
I put “mar” in quotes to draw attention to the pun: it’s not subtle, but if one doesn’t recognize that “marring,” the opening doesn’t make much sense. Like all translations, there are compromises. In the Italian, she is as lovely as the “candida ligustro,” the white (or pure, innocent) privet (Ligustrum lucidum); but I thought daffodils might be seem more graceful and familiar to us (remember Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils”?). And Guarini’s Amaryllis is not compared to a rattlesnake, as I do, but to an asp (“sordo” — deaf); too complicated, and then there are those associations with Cleopatra. . . .
So, as I said at the outset, composers loved this poem—for its abrupt opening, its contrasts between Amaryllis’s beauty and her wildness, and its swift retreat from complaint at the end into silence and death. The most famous composer to set it was Claudio Monteverdi, who gave it a position of importance as the first song in his innovative Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605). Other composers you might recognize are Luca Marenzio (1595), Jacob de Wert (1595), and the wonderfully-named Sigismondo d’India (1606 and again in 1609).
Monteverdi’s setting, like the majority of Italian madrigals of the period, is for five voices (two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass). Listen for the dissonances underlining and stretching out the bitterness of “amaramente” — the sudden harmonic change to mark the beauty of “ligustro,” — the snaky vocal line on “aspido” (asp) — the lively motion of the asp at “fugace” — and the dramatic pulling-back on “poi che col dir t’offendo” (lest I offend you by speaking).
https://youtu.be/bKTQQ28sSNoFour years later, Sigismondo d’India published his setting of “Cruda Amarilli” for one voice. Using only a solo soprano means the text is clearer, though necessarily less richly set. I particularly enjoy the runs on “fugace” (“fast-moving”) and the beautiful tapering off of “tacendo” (“going silent”). Here’s a performance by soprano Valentina Salinas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOLYmDzQbl4If you enjoy this post, there will be more based on my interest in poetry, translating and music. Please sign up to get email notices of further posts.