135. ‘Qual più diversa et nova’

Whatever varied and strange thing

may exist in whatever foreign land,

I truly think it most

resembles me: to such I’m come, Love.

There where the day is born,

flies a bird, alone without a mate,

that rises from self-willed

death, and is reborn to life.

So is my desire

found alone, and so it turns to the heights

of noble thought, towards the sun,

and so it is destroyed,

and so returns to its first state:

it burns, and dies, and regains its strength,

able to live again as the phoenix does.

There is a stone so ardent

there in the Indian Ocean, that by nature

it draws iron to itself, steals nails

from wood, so that vessels sink.

I demonstrate this, among waves

of bitter tears, because the lovely reef

with its harsh pride,

has led me where my life must founder:

so my soul is stripped

(stealing the heart that once was whole,

and making me now scattered and divided)

a stone to draw flesh

more than iron. O my cruel fate

that being flesh I see myself dragged to shore

towards a sweet living danger!

In the far west

there is a creature gentler

and sweeter than any other, yet she

bears tears and grief and death in her eyes:

and he must take care

who ever turns his sight towards her:

only if he does not gaze into her eyes,

can he safely look at her.

But I, incautious, grieving,

always run towards my hurt, and I know

how much I suffered and expect to:

but my blind deaf desire

so transports me, that the lovely face

and veiled eyes will be a reason why I perish

of this innocent angelic creature.

In the mid-south a fountain

rises, taking its name from the sun,

that by nature

burns at night, and in the day is cold:

and so it cools

as the sun climbs, and it is nearer.

So it is with me,

who am the fount and place of tears:

when the bright lovely light

that is my sun departs, and my eyes

are sad and lonely, and night obscures them,

I burn: but if I see the gold

and rays of my living sun appear,

I feel myself alter inside and out,

and I freeze, as if turned to ice.

Another fountain is in Epirus,

of which it’s written that being cold

it ignites spent torches,

and quenches those that are lit.

My spirit, that had not yet

been attacked by loving fire,

drawing near

to that cold I always sigh for,

blazed up: and suffering

like it was never seen by sun or star:

it might have moved a marble heart to pity:

once it was inflamed,

her beautiful cold power re-quenched it.

So my heart has been many times lit and spent:

I know how I felt, and often it angers me.

Beyond our every shore,

in the famed Fortunate Isles,

there are two founts: he who drinks

of the one dies smiling: if of the other he’s saved.

A like fate shapes

my life, since I could die smiling,

with the great delight I derive,

if it were not tempered by sad cries.

Love, who still guides me,

into the shadows, dark and hidden from fame,

let us be silent about that fountain,

always full, but seen

with greater flow when the sun’s in Taurus:

so my eyes weep all the time,

but more at the time I first saw my lady.

Song, if they ask

how I am, you can say: ‘He lives

under a great rock in a closed valley,

where the Sorgue rises, where no one

sees him, except Love, who never leaves his side,

and that image with him, of one who destroys him,

for whom he flees all other people.