Poetry
Complete Poems
Rime
Guido Cavalcanti · 1300
Synopsis
Some fifty poems, sonnets, ballads, songs and a motet, written in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. Love is a force that escapes reason and undoes the one it strikes: the “spirits”, those breaths that the natural philosophy of the time attributes to the body, flee before the lady's beauty. The song “Donna me prega”, the most famous, sets out the nature of love in the language of a philosophical treatise.
Context
The manuscript tradition preserves from him one motet, two canzoni, eleven ballate and thirty-six sonnets. A central figure of the “dolce stil novo”, he was called by Dante his first friend, and the English-language modernists, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, drew on him in the twentieth century. Christian Bec translated him into French under the title “Rimes” at the Imprimerie nationale in 1993; Anthony Mortimer translated him into English in 2010 under the title “Complete Poems”.
Who it is for
Some fifty short texts, whose difficulty lies less in the language than in the conception of love that they set out.
Prizes and reception
Dante, in the Vita nuova, calls him the first of his friends; Ezra Pound translated and commented on him.
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