Apart from Beatrice

Dante Society (SA), Adelaide, 7 July 2024

The afternoon was an homage to ‘The Eternal Feminine,’ and Beatrice hardly got a mention.

The Honourable Jing Lee MLC (below, centre) gave a pleasant ‘welcome to all countries’ in emphasis of the upside of multiculturalism, and then we heard from a number of authors from the Ascolta Women Inc. Collective (a creative writing workshop formed in 2020 under the shadow of Covid), to launch their latest anthology, Stories from La Terra, and they read out a few excerpts.

Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) (see main image in B/W) had an unhappy love affair with a cold and insouciant Count, Collaltino di Collalto (below). After it ended, Taylor Swift-like, she “Shook it Off” and turned the crushing blow into art, in several hundred sonnets.

At this meeting of the Dante Society, Professor Alessandro Boria presented “I Blame Love“, a lively, informative, thrilling lecture on Stampa’s work as an (almost) forgotten voice of the Renaissance.

Rilke, in the First Duino Elegy, wrote this:

“But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long

their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough.

Those, you almost envied them, the forsaken, that you

found as loving as those who were satisfied. Begin,

always as new, the unattainable praising:

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling

was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature

into herself, as if there were not the power

to make them again. Have you remembered

Gaspara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl,

whose lover has gone, might feel from that

intenser example of love: ‘Could I only become like her?’

Should not these ancient sufferings be finally

fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that, loving,

we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured

as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight,

something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.”

[Translated by A. S. Kline, “The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke” (2015)]

Rilke’s poem, written 400 hundred years after Stampa’s birth, took as a key Stampa’s work and influence. In the Stephen Mitchell translation, from “The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke” (Pan, 1980), the Elegy reads:

“But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;

for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing

of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)

who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.

Begin again and again the never-attainable praising;

remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was

merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.

But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back

into herself, as if there were not enough strength

to create them a second time. Have you imagined

Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl

deserted by her beloved might be inspired

by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love

and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her”?

Shouldn’t this most ancient of sufferings finally grow

more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly

freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:

as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that

gathered in the snap of release it can be more than

itself. For there is no place where we can remain.”

Rilke was writing to his erstwhile host at Duino Castle, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, and seems to throw down the gauntlet: turn pain into art, so that there can be meaning, understanding, even healing.

The main tenet of Professor Boria’s talk however, was far more subtle. He noted the enormous, overweening influence of the poems of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), the high stylist of the early Renaissance, and to a lesser extent, his acolyte, Pietro Bembo. He pointed out that Stampa was the first of the Renaissance poets to focus on the personal as opposed to the ecumenical elements of Love. (And we don’t mean personal in Ovid’s or Guillaume de Lorris’ sense). In a concise and neat demonstration, Professor Boria compared the Petrarch sensibility – mystical, courtly, conventional – with Stampa’s after-effects of a love wound as a first-degree burn.

Here are some random cantos from Gaspara Stampa, derived from A. S. Kline translations, 2021, online at “Poetry in Translation,” [https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/GasparaStampaFiftySonnets.php].

XIII

I wept, I burned, I sang, I burn and sing,

I shall weep, and burn, and sing forever –

Till Death, or Fortune, or Time, as ever,

Dim wit, eyes, heart, style, tears, fire, everything –

The beauty, worth, and wisdom outright,

With which, in fair, wise, honourable fashion,

Love, Nature, and learning temper passion,

In his face, breast, and heart, with holy light.

For, as the Sun comes and goes, then day,

Winter, summer, each passing hour of night,

Shadow and light, he brings and takes away.

So that, with outward and with inward sight,   

I find in his deeds, words, his every way,

A sweetness there: grace, splendour, shining bright.

XXIII

Receive of me my courteous lament

And bear it faithfully to my great Lord;

O blessed happy winds of France, consent,

To whom those bright handsome eyes light afford.

And tell him, in accents sadly yearning,

That if he be not moved to aid this heart,

The light from out my eyes must swift depart,

Should he nor write, nor be soon returning,

For the extreme and the endless torment

I’ve suffered through his absence pains me so,

Death alone is my fear and my intent.

And if my dying words were to blow

Through the sky, in vain, though truly meant,

I’ve no defence, no art of mine to show.

XXXIV

Thus, though I lack all life, I live in pain,

And, living without joy, feel no content.

Dead and alive, Love doth me so maintain;

To neither death nor life grants me consent.

So, all folk born discover their own fate;

Such is mine, born neath a cruel planet,

That though I’ve never scattered seeds of hate,

Sour fruit I harvest, in a parched desert.

And if I wished to put an end to torment,

Through my death, that’s not mine to do,

For, lacking life, one cannot give assent

To dying so; nor what Love has in view,

Nor heaven, can I know, or what is meant

By this, except I’m wretched: that is true.

XLIII

At your leaving, all my joy left with you,

And with it my hope departed, my ardour,

My heart, all my courage, and my vigour;

My soul, my life, nigh on departed too.

There alone remains, more so than before,

A burning and importunate desire,

Which, in your absence, but flares the higher,

While infinite woes shake me to the core.

And if a letter brings not sure relief,

Or a messenger, or your own return,

Then indeed my life can be but brief.

For with naught else but death does true love burn;

A thousand times have I proved that belief,

Who own to little hope yet greatly yearn.

XLVIII

The wound, that I believed had now been healed,

Thanks to his absence, and that lack of love

His heart, hard as the Alps, and slow to move

And cold as is the winter’s snow, revealed,

Opes, now and then; hot to the touch it grows,

It oozes fluid now, and now leaks blood,

So that my soul is fearful, when it should,

By now, be bold and certain, heaven knows.

Even as I seek this fresh noose to cast

About my neck, I cannot yet be sure

The former knot will fail to hold me fast.

They say fire drives off fire, and yet, Amor,

You, set on torturing me until the last,

That proverb’s lack of force, in me, ensure.

———————————————————-

It was pointed out that for a long time, Stampa’s work was dismissed. There seems to have been a strong whiff of misogyny, or at least chauvinism, about this: e.g. Benedetto Croce: “She was a woman; And usually a woman, when she is not given to ape men, uses poetry and submits it to her affections because she loves her lover or her own children more than poetry. The lazy practice of women is revealed in their scanty theoretical and contemplative power.”

Time changes things. In 2013, Johanna Vernqvist writes:

“In the 16th century a revolution took place for women poets in Italy and Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) was one of the strongest voices of the period. She is not only a woman writing within a literary code created by and for men, Petrarchism – she writes her poetry with confidence, takes tone and makes a woman’s voice heard where it traditionally does not exist. She goes against ideals and creates female speaking and loving subject. At the same time, she makes man her muse and silent object of her praise. And where the tradition divides love in high and low, heavenly and earthbound, Stampa seeks union of body and soul, a union of the two lovers, because without love life is not even worth living.”