To browse Academia. The Italian verse of Milton consists of but six poems: five sonnets and the single stanza of a canzone. His choice is both unusual and entirely fitting. How did Milton, born in Cheapside, acquire Italian at such an elevated level of proficiency? When did he write these poems and where?
Is the woman about whom he speaks an historical person or is she merely the poetic trope demanded by the genre? The Secretary for Foreign Tongues must of necessity function as poet and polemicist, routinely crossing linguistic frontiers whensoever the genre requires it. In this respect, the Italian verse of Milton β in which the poet responds in a strania favella [foreign speech] to the demands of love β is an early occurrence of the effort of the Commonwealth rhetor who likewise answers the challenges of European censure by exploiting the plurilingual resources of Renaissance humanism.
Most of all, the Italian verse gives us a glimpse of the systematic reformation of Petrarchist poetics that Milton undertakes in his later verse in English. Perhaps it is because Petrarchan values came to England directly from Italian sources that Milton decides to reform petrarchismo first in Italian. The article further indicates that Milton might have had several different texts by these writers in mind when he mentions their namesβand not just their most famous theoretical works, which have been the sole focus of critics thus far.
This paper deals with the history of translation in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. It investigates the reasons behind six unsuccessful attempts to translate john milton's Paradise Lost into the Italian language. We hypothesise that the problem was the rendering of unusually marked lexical, thematic, stylistic and rhythmical analogies with dante's Comedy and, mainly, with its sources. Adopting Antonio Bellati's Italian translation as an indicator, our study focuses on problematic aspects intrinsic to the english poem.
Specifically, we suggest that the challenge was the transposition of Paradise Lost's peculiar mixture of style and meter: the blank verse of a Christian epic poem. This uniqueness rendered it too similar to dante's Comedy. Likewise, the setting and the subject matter of the english poem were too adherent to that of both dante and Virgil's Aeneid one of dante's main sources.
