Secretum

Francesco Petrarch

Description

By writing what he called a "secret book" - taking the shape of a conversation between himself and St Augustine - Petrarch aimed to compose a cathartic text which would alleviate his spiritual crisis and help him make further inroads towards knowledge and fulfilment.At once an intimate repository of his most personal thoughts and emotions and a literary masterpiece dealing with universal issues, Secretum - Petrarch's best-known work in Latin - is a fascinating and pioneering example of the autobiographical genre.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714547855
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Secretum
Petrarch
Translated by J.G. Nichols


ALMA CLASSICS


alma classics ltd
Hogarth House
32-34 Paradise Road
Richmond
Surrey TW9 1SE
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
This translation of Secretum first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2002
A revised edition with additional material first published by Alma
Classics Ltd (previously Oneworld Classics Ltd) in 2010
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2015
Translation © J.G. Nichols, 2002, 2010
Cover image © anyka / 123RF
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-468-9
All the material in this volume is reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge the copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
Secretum
My Secret Book
An Auspicious Proem
A Draft of a Letter to Posterity
The Allegorical Ascent of Mount Ventoux
Books, the Best Company
Italy, My Native Land
Note on the Texts


Introduction
The saying’s all too true: we lose our hair
But not our habits; and our failing sense
Does not make mortal feelings less intense.
The shade our bodies cast is guilty here.
Petrarch, Canzoniere , CXXII
Best known nowadays for the Italian love poems of his Canzoniere , Petrarch also wrote many verse and prose works in Latin. These reveal the same obsessions as the vernacular poems and, since the obsessions are very per sonal ones, one might expect personal revelations. This is no more, and no less, true of Petrarch’s Latin prose than it is of his Italian verse: we are shown various states of mind, and we are made more and more aware of his habitual cast of mind, but Petrarch was not writing merely to satisfy our curiosity or our lust for facts.
Even those who agree that a poet is never under oath in what he writes, and that often “the truest poetry is the most feigning” (Shakespeare, As You Like It ), may be tempted to take a piece of apparently private prose as factually more reliable than poetry. The temptation is a very great one, for a biographer, or for a lover of biography; but, with Petrarch at least, it is best resisted. There is, for instance, the famous note which Petrarch made in his copy of Virgil:
Laura, renowned for her own virtues and so long celebrated in my poems, was first seen by me in my early manhood, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of Saint Clare, Avignon, in the morning hour; and in the same city in the same month of April on the same sixth day at the same first hour of the morning, but in the year 1348, was that light taken from the light of day, when I as it happened was in Verona, unaware, alas, of my fate. The sorrowful news, however, reached me in Parma the same year…
This note is consistent with the poems in the Canzoniere , but they themselves are inconsistently dated. Also, anyone could be pardoned for suspecting that the coincidences mentioned above are rather too good to be true. Dante, as his Vita nuova shows, was another who encountered remarkably significant coincidences in his life. We have here a way of writing, and of thinking, for which there is no precise modern equivalent. Petrarch’s note is best read, not as the result of a moment’s indiscretion, all the more valuable because it was not intended for our eyes, but as part of his legend of Laura. After all, this is not a scribble on a loose sheet of paper or the back of an envelope: it is in a very valuable codex, one illustrated by Simone Martini, no less: to write a note in such a book was virtually to publish the note; and it has survived to the present day.
In most of his works Petrarch is writing fictionalized auto biography, making no distinction in this respect between his use of Latin and Italian, or between prose and verse, or between letters and other writings. Some of the implications of literary form which are today used (perhaps too readily) to distinguish “the life” from “the work” are clearly not relevant here. So even in what he styled his “familiar letters” Petrarch does not let the facts get in the way of a good story – and a good story is often one which has a moral. With no more regard than Sir Philip Sidney had for “the historian in his bare was ” ( The Defence of Poesie ), Petrarch always shapes his material to bring out its significance: his account of the ascent of Mont Ventoux is a very clear instance. To borrow from Sidney again, Petrarch’s writings tend to be “things not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written”. This does not mean that we must always be looking for allegory – if the allegory is there it will find us – but we do ourselves no favours if we try to look behind the words to the life, as if that were what mattered.
So this book does not pretend to be a miniature biography of Petrarch. There is, of course, a life here, or was a life there – somewhere; now, however, we are concerned not with Petrarch as he was (if that were possible to know), but rather with how Petrarch wished himself to be seen. We have a number of self-portraits, not by any means always flattering, but all interesting in and for themselves. We see, not his life, but what his artistry made of his life.
One can only guess why Petrarch called this work Secretum ( Secret Book ) . Was it, as he says, because he never intended to publish it? Or because he wanted to make sure that, once it was published, after his death perhaps, it would be read?
The stateliness of the proem modulates, as the dialogues begin, into a lively debate. Then the sophistry of St Augustine’s first line of attack (that no one is unhappy who does not wish to be!) develops into a detailed exploration of Petrarch’s psychological and moral state, which – while it concentrates on his two chief weaknesses (his tendency to acedia and his lust for glory) – is also an exploration of the common human lot. The two explorers do not always advance in a straight line: often they return to base, and often they seem to halt in order to bombard each other with quotations. They are convincingly presented as bookish men (as indeed their historical models were), and their quotations, while it is easier nowadays to see them as illustrative rather than authoritative, do help to place the dialogues in a broad context of human speculation. As for the apparent meandering of the protagonists’ thoughts, Yeats reminds us (I find that the habit of quotation, and its appeal to authority, is catching) that
…wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.
(‘Tom O’Roughley’)

Comparison with Augustine’s Confessions would be inevit able even if Petrarch did not encourage it. Of course the Secretum does not have the wide scope of the Confessions , or their metaphysical profundity, but Petrarch did not intend that it should. His interest is here, as always, in morals rather than metaphysics: he takes the Christian mysteries for granted, and then considers, in the light of those mysteries and of his extensive reading (mainly of pagan authors), how a Christian should live.
Regarding A Draft of a Letter to Posterity , all auto biographies are, of course, bound to remain unfinished; but the events mentioned in this letter only take us up to a point more than twenty years before Petrarch’s death. Also, very surprisingly for such an obsessive writer, the letters has clearly not been revised. Petrarch was, in his own words, “never able to stay still”: he is the perfect example of the medieval wandering scholar. Here he wanders through his memories. The translator’s temptation to reorder the material chronologically or thematically have been resisted.
The Allegorical Ascent of Mont Ventoux is a letter to the Augustinian monk Dionisi da Borgo San Sepolcro who is mentioned in the text as having given Petrarch a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions . It is interesting, and revealing, that some years after the date of this climb Petrarch’s brother entered a monastery.
– J.G. Nichols


Secretum


My Secret Book
The Private Conflict of My Thoughts


An Auspicious Proem
It happened recently. I was lost in thought, considering as I often do the way in which I came into this world and the way in which I must leave it; not overcome with sleep, as sick people often are, but wide awake with anxiety. Then I seemed to see a woman; she was from a time and of a splendour impossible to describe, and of a beauty which no mortal comprehends. By her clothes and general appearance she was a maiden; but I do not know how she came to be there. I was stunned by such unaccustomed radiance, and did not dare to raise my eyes to look at the sunlight streaming from hers, but I did hear her speak: “Do not let this rare beauty confuse or trouble you. I pity your errors, and I have descended from a distant place to bring you some much-needed help. You have already spent enough time – more than enough – looking down at the ground with your clouded eyes. Now, if mortal things attract you so much, what may you not hope for if you lift up your eyes to that which is eternal?”
After she had spoken I