BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 31 Jul 19 - 05:03 PM

Indeed, no Michelangelo thread
would be complete without reference
to the teenage mutant ninja turtles.


Here is a by-no-means exhaustive, nor complete,
list of other languages into which
some (if not all) of Michelangelo's sonnets have been translated.


First, would you believe, in 1595, some northern Italian (Bologna)
attempted to render one sonnet in ... Latin
("Et spes annis nondum contenta peractis")

English, French, and German translations began to show up
in the years approaching 1800 in the common era,
and in all three languages
there were multiple attempts.

Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, did not complete translations
of all the poetry, but he worked hard at those he did translate into German,
publishing his collection in Wiesbaden.

From the 1800's into the 1900's, and over that turn of centuries,
came translations in
Polish, Hungarian, Croatian.

The Russians stood up to be counted in the 1900's.

A Cuban native exiled to the United States took on the challenge
of Spanish translations (2012: La Cruz del Sur).

Catalan translations (incomplete)
date from 2010 (Edicions Vitella).

Brazil was the source of Portuguese translations in 1994
(Nilson Moulin, Col. Lazuli).

Stopping there, but I would be shocked
if there were not translations in even more languages.

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 29 Jul 19 - 04:59 PM

"From the time that his poetry met the light of day,
there was controversy, because
Michelangelo wrote passionate love poems to another man,
without covering up the same-sex orientation in the language
(personal pronouns in masculine gender and so on)." (Keberoxu)...similar to Shakespeare's sonnets, I seem to recall.

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 29 Jul 19 - 04:46 PM

He is also quite handy with Nunchaku, and wears an orange eye-mask.

Ooops, sorry, I just remember my wife trying all over Cardiff to get the character figures when our son was growing up.

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 27 Jul 19 - 05:23 PM

This Michelangelo sonnet is much enjoyed for obvious reasons.

"Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel" [translator: Gail Mazur]

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: leeneia
Date: 26 Jul 19 - 12:14 PM

Thanks, keb. I will check out the links.

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 01:09 PM

A link to more English translations,
including William Wordsworth.

nine Michelangelo poems

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 12:36 PM

I quote this endnote from Christopher Ryan
to demonstrate how
Michelangelo's sexuality remains
controversial to this very day.

"There is a consensus today that Michelangelo was homosexual in orientation. Whether as a homosexual he led an active sexual life is another matter: for differing views compare the robustly assertive [R. J.] Clements and the more cautious [J. M.] Saslow; see also biographies,... especially those by [R. S.] Liebert, [A.] Stokes and [N.] Leites. Such evidence as we have is indirect, and inconclusive. The present writer thinks that the fairly meagre indications in the sources suggest that it is quite likely that Michelangelo was to some extent homosexually active before he moved permanently to Rome in 1534, but improbable that he continued to be so after that date; this is the less surprising in view of his close friendship[s] in Rome with with the morally and religiously orthodox Tomasso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Saslow sets Michelangelo in the context of attitudes to homosexuality in various regions of Italy in the sixteenth century, while a detailed study of the more immediate background of homosexuality in fifteenth-century Florence is given by [M.] Rocke."

-- Ryan, page 260


... and this is only in English; imagine, if you dare,
the raised voices, so to speak,
in Italian, German, French, Russian ...

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 12:02 PM

Translating Michelangelo's poetry poses the choice:
to rhyme, or not to rhyme?

Symonds was one of the intrepid translators
whose English translation rhymes and fits the meter.

English translations exist that are free of meter or rhyming.
With a subject like Michelangelo, this has good sense.

Because Michelangelo's Italian is not graceful, masterful, or beautiful.
It is like a blacksmith in the forge,
hammering the [expletive-deleted] out of the red-hot iron.
Much of Michelangelo's personality, as well as his genius,
comes out when he writes sonnets or madrigals;
the result is passionate, intense, choppy, ambiguous,
rough, contradictory ... just plain difficult.


Here is an English translator who makes
English prose out of Tuscan sonnets.

sorry, my attempt to make a link failed
The Poetry of Michelangelo, Christopher Ryan, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Subject: RE: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 11:36 AM

Thanks to Leeneia, who wanted more information,
this thread can go into Michelangelo's literary work.

John Addington Symonds' Sonnets of Michelangelo [English translation]

I especially favor the one,
"Love is a Refiner's Fire," page 66.

Subject: BS: Michelangelo was a writer as well
From: keberoxu
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 11:26 AM

On a BS thread, passing reference was made to
the biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti and
how he felt when one of his close friends died.

That thread having a different topic, of sorts,
I didn't want to go into Michelangelo there.

So, a first for Mudcat,
a thread with Michelangelo's name in the title.

Yes, he wrote sonnets and madrigals, in the Tuscan vernacular
of Dante, more or less today's Italian.

From the time that his poetry met the light of day,
there was controversy, because
Michelangelo wrote passionate love poems to another man,
without covering up the same-sex orientation in the language
(personal pronouns in masculine gender and so on).

So for centuries his poems were bowdlerized;
it was only in the 1800's that
editors like Cesare Guasti did the scholarship,
referred to the Buonarroti archives,
and published the authentic "Rime" with footnotes and annotations.

With the 1900's, matters went further;
by this time the Italian lyrics were being translated
into I don't know how many other languages.

The English writer John Addington Symonds,
homosexual and resolutely so,
wrote groundbreaking English translations of
Michelangelo's poems.
That was a hundred years ago,
and if anything
the poetry has been more closely studied,
better publicized, since then.

People who set these to music are few and far between, such as
classical composers
Hugo Wolf,
Dmitri Shostakovich,
Benjamin Britten.