Francesco Petrarch’s Canzoniere (translated in English as ‘Scattered Rhymes’) is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their deep exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Written over the course of forty years (approximately between 1328-1368), this collection includes 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 4 madrigals and 7 ballate. These Scattered Rhymes almost always return to Laura, a women who Petrarch loves deeply, whom he first saw on a Good Friday. On this same day, some years later, Laura died. But Petrarch’s love does not wane, in fact at points it burns brighter. Il Canzoniere also serves as a valuable contemporary insight into 14th century religion and the role of the papacy in Christendom. Petrarch’s work is one of civilization’s most immaculate achievements. Michael R. G. Spiller regards Il Canzoniere as ‘the single greatest inspiration for the love poetry of Renaissance Europe until well into the seventeenth century’. Following his acclaimed translation of Dante’s Inferno, which ‘immediately joins ranks with the very best available in English’ (Dr Richard Lansing), Peter Thornton brings the poetry of Petrarch to the 21st Century in direct and luminous verse.
A propos de l’auteur
Peter Thornton grew up in New York City and attended a Jesuit prep school in Manhattan where the curriculum was still based on Latin and Greek. After graduating from Boston College, he originally set out to be an academic. He took a Ph.D. in English literature at Stanford and taught for several years at Bradley University in Illinois. Then, like his father and his three brothers, he decided to become a lawyer and spent the rest of his career happily practising law in Chicago, where he was recognized as a leading practitioner. The intellectual rigor of the law, however, did not satisfy his hunger for poetry and he spent decades translating Dante and Petrarch into English verse. Peter’s translation of Dante’s Inferno was acclaimed by Richard Lansing as a work that ‘immediately joins ranks with the very best available in English.’
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