“I see acutely, but this is why my struggle is more severe, for I am angry at myself and am an enemy to my soul” (3). The passage, part of Demetrio Yocum’s translation of Petrarch’sPsalmus I, is an excellent instance of the poet’s reiteration of his inner conflicts; it highlights the extent to which the allegedly minor religious poetry discussed in this volume is relevant to the understanding of Petrarch’s complex personality and poetic profile, and may act as a salutary reminder that behind the justly celebrated Italian love poetry there is a wealth of essentially meditational writing. The theme of the inner struggle recurs in Petrarch’s writings, and finds its climax in Secretum, a work whose final line (“de secreto conflictu curarum suarum,” which can be translated as “on the secret struggle of his own miseries,” and is conventionally adopted as the official title), well expresses the dominance of the theme in the latter part of the poet’s devotional work. For the anglophone reader who wants to consider this topic against the wider context of the poet’s opus, this book, offering the first complete English translation of Petrarch’sPsalms and Prayers and much more, is essential reading.
The Penitential Psalms, inspired by the seven penitential Psalms of the liturgy, are presented here together with an authoritative selection of the poet’s prayers. All the texts appear in the original Latin version, taken from the recent edition by Donatella Coppini. [1] Yocum’s translation into modern English is complemented by a substantial introduction and a rich set of endnotes. As always in this case, I found the publisher’s choice of adopting endnotes rather than footnotes slightly frustrating: Petrarch’s text, in spite of the clearness and accessibility of the translation, calls for articulate glossing, which Yocum provides, but their being confined to the end of the volume means that even a casual reader has to skip back and forth every few lines. The same choice has been made in the case of the Introduction; since Yocum often uses endnotes to expand upon a number of topics and to open spaces of discussions on themes related to those of the main text, such a choice feels rather counterintuitive.
This, however, does not detract from the value of the book, which sets its agenda very clearly from the beginning, offering the translation as an aid to understanding the coexistence of secular and religious motifs in Petrarch’s major works. For this reason, discussions of textual issues are set aside, while the questions related to dating and sources of the poems are left to the second part of the Introduction. As the editor makes immediately clear, in approaching Petrarch’s works we need to keep in mind his strongly and essentially religious outlook, the fact that for him “reading, writing, and praising God were deeply intertwined” (xvii). Such intertwining informed even the most secular moments of the poet’s career: at the apex of his search for earthly glory, that is, in the oration he gave on the occasion of his poetic coronation, Petrarch reminded his audience that God was “the giver and bestower of his poetic genius” (xviii). In using this as the starting point of the discussion, the Introduction thus offers a necessary contextualization that modern scholarship may sometimes overlook in its search for secular and classicizing tropes, a search that too often tends to restrict the reading of Petrarch to theCanzoniere.
Within this clearly stated religious framework, and within Petrarch’s daily practice of reading the Divine Hours, Yocum sets the poet’s intimate knowledge of the Biblical Psalms. Thus, the book also uses this case study to give us a sense of the importance and ubiquity of the Psalms in late medieval intellectual life in Europe; it is not by chance that Petrarch’s own works, even outside this context, would cite David far more often than, say, Virgil or Ovid. We are therefore made aware of the fact that the poetry presented in this volume constituted a central moment in the poet’s reflection, as he considered the Davidic text both a religious and a poetic model. Yocum’s analysis is welcome in that it complicates for us the image of Petrarch that has been consigned to twenty-first century readers. We should think of the writer “not only as civic poet and public intellectual but also as religious, spiritual auctor” (xx), Yocum notes, persuasively arguing that these two sides coexist. His conclusion—“if, on the one hand, the inner conflicts between secular and religious life...may never have completely abandoned Petrarch during his life, on the other hand, they found resolution in his writing” (xxv)—may be debatable, as it runs the risk of oversimplification, but it is cogently argued. His proposed dating of the Petrarchan psalms is in line with recent scholarship: the poems are said to have been written between 1343 and 1350, very probably before the composition of the Secretum. These works are therefore seen as marking a shift from the poet’s keen attention for classical models to more Christian concerns. At the same time, they mark Petrarch’s phase of introspective writing, a phase which culminated in De otio religioso, De vita solitaria, and Secretum. In his discussion of this point, Yocum wisely maintains the ambiguity between self-confession and self-fashioning in his reading of Petrarch’s writings, connecting this ambiguity to the wide circulation of Petrarch’s seven psalms, especially in a monastic context.
These strong interpretative premises drive the subsequent discussion of the sources behind Petrarch’s psalms and prayers, as Yocum analyses the role played by Latin Christian authors, by classical, pre-Christian sources, but also by the tradition of Latin Christian hymnody. Particularly insightful is the discussion of the relationship with Dante—always a very delicate point in Petrarchan scholarship—who, in Yocum’s words, had already fashioned himself along the Davidic lines of the scriba Dei in the Commedia, and as such constituted a strong and unavoidable model for the younger poet. But I also found Yocum’s discussion of Francis of Assisi’s Canticle and Office of the Passion extremely illuminating, in line with his contention that we ignore more “popular” devotional writing at our peril. Finally, a moment of close analysis is dedicated to the comparison between Petrarch’s Psalms and their immediate sources, the Davidic penitential poems. Here Yocum shows us how Petrarch set up a richly intertextual dialogue with the Biblical text, interlacing linguistic analysis with an exploration of motifs and tropes: the consciousness of this intertextuality strongly influences also Yocum’s work as a translator, which constitutes the centre of his book.
This part of the work is perhaps the most difficult task for the scholar. In his Note on the Translation, Yocum pays homage to Jerome and to his argument for the avoidance of theverbum de verbo rendering of the original. Such a consideration drives him to try “to remain as faithful as possible to Petrarch’s original text while also striving to produce a readable version in clear and idiomatic English” (lxi). Inevitably, the balance is extremely difficult to obtain in this case, as any English version of these texts would also have to contend with the overarching influence of the language of the Authorised version of the Bible, a language that inevitably colours expressions of prayers for the anglophone reader. The version Yocum offers us occasionally veers between the traditionally liturgical and the deliberately informal (as can be noted in the passage with which this review begins), but in this, I feel, it may also reflect Petrarch’s own stylistic uncertainties. It is, in any case, remarkably helpful for readers who want to use it as a starting point to come to terms with Petrarch’s occasionally irksome Latin.
The book is complemented by Petrarch’s prayers. As the corpus is uncertain and attributions are occasionally dubious, Yocum has chosen simply to adhere to the already mentioned 2010 edition, publishing and translating the same selection edited by Coppini. The textual issue is made slightly unclear by the fact that for the prayers Yocum also indicates the manuscript that Coppini used (Paris, BnF, Lat. 2201). The numerous and detailed notes appended to the translations are an invaluable help for readers finding their way in the tangled maze of Petrarch’s sources and verbal echoes; they give strength and substance to Yocum’s claim that in Petrarch’s work the classical scholar and the Christian reader are never separated. By exploring in depth and detail a work that has always been considered of secondary interest, this book offers excellent insights into Petrarch’s compositive methods at large, his relationship with his sources, and his relationship with his intended readership—the latter always an extremely difficult point in the case of this writer. The very wide-ranging and updated bibliography, which pays close attention to the extremely rich critical production in Italian on the topic, testifies to Yocum’s solid credentials as a scholar. With this book, he has rendered a remarkable service to Petrarchan scholars and enthusiasts, offering a readable and engaging point of access to some of the least known works of the Tuscan poet.
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Note:
1. Donatella Coppini, Francesco Petrarca. Psalmi penitentiales; orationes (Milan: Le Lettere, 2010).