Randomly stumbling on 700 years old poetry

This morning i found myself re-reading one of the most famous sonnet by Dante Alighieri: "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" (So gentle and virtuous she appears). I say re-reading as it is one of his work that every italian students has to read if not even memorize at least one (if not more) times in his/her school life.
This sonnet is part of La Vita Nova (The New Life... i just realized now that i went for a few years to a very modern looking gym called New Life!).



"Dante and Beatrice" by Henry Holiday - Unknown. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare La donna mia quand'ella altrui saluta Ch'ogne lingua deven tremando muta, E li occhi no l'ardiscon di guardare. Ella si va, sentendosi laudare, Benignamente d'umilta' vestuta; E par che sia una cosa venuta Da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare. Mostrasi si' piacente a chi la mira, Che da' per li occhi una dolcezza al core, Che 'ntender non la puo' chi no la prova; E par che de la sua labbia si mova Uno spirito soave pien d'amore, Che va dicendo a l'anima: "Sospira."

So gentle and virtuous she appears, My lady, when greeting other people That every tongue tremblingly grows silent, And eyes do not dare gaze upon her. She passes by, hearing herself praised, Graciously clothed with humility, And she appears to be a creature who has come From heaven to earth to show forth a miracle. She shows herself so pleasing to her beholders, That she gives through the eyes a sweetness to the heart, Which no one can understand who does not feel it; And it appears that from her lip moves A tender spirit full of love, Which says again and again to the soul: "Sigh." Translation by Luciano Rebay

This time I've taken a little time to read it a few times, to think a little about it and to reminisces about those school times and these are the results:

• This is one of the defining poem of Dante's obsession with Beatrice Portinari (the woman that will intercede and guide him in the Commedia) and with love as an almost pure spiritual/platonic thing (damning lesser men for centuries...)
• The language is so readable by modern italians and it was written some 720 years ago!
• I feel giddy and guilty because when studying it at school i wrote a parody of it (or at least of the first lines), playing on the meaning of onesta/virtuous pare/appears ;-)
• This girl (Dante himself met her only two times, once when they were nine years old and once when they were eighteen) does not even (or can't) be described in her physical appearance, she is too beautiful for words and/or her beauty is not corporeal.
• In the end Dante married (they were betrothed when he was twelve) another woman: Gemma di Manetto Donati, a woman he never mentioned in his works and that bore him at least two sons and a daughter (that became a nun choosing Beatrice as her name...)

I even just discovered today is World Poetry Day..

Interesting in translation vol. 3

In past weeks i had my brain swirling with thoughts about the use of you in english as both the singular and plural form of the second person. I'm not thinking about the T-V question (the intimate against the honorific use of the second person) but just on how much this lack of number distinction influence thinking.

Even if in the end ideas come before language, language influences thinking patterns (Newspeak from 1984 anyone ?) and so i'm wondering how english speaking minds deal with this lack of differentiation.
Whenever i think about that i think also about subtle and evil group dynamics, with people thinking about friend/neutral/antagonist factions and speaking differentiating between a single you and making the others you becoming a threatening them.

In every language, especially in writings this problem arises, just think about this: in a group of more than three persons one of them says "Would you come with us ?" In english it is not clear how many people are asked to come with how many "of us", in italian it could be translated in two ways, "[Tu] Vieni con noi ?" and "[Voi] Venite con noi ?". The first form is clear, one person is asked to come while in the second at least two persons are asked; it is always unclear how many people "us" is referring to.  And in both cases if this is happening in writing instead of face to face it is absolutely unclear who exactly the you are!  The bracketed pronouns are usually omitted as the italian verb conjugation is explicit enough to get the idea. I find it almost amusing that the language using pronouns more explicitly is the one being more confusing ;-) .

In a similar way i'm even wondering if/how much people living in the United States of America thinks about the pronoun us  being the same as the usual shortening of their state name: US.  Do they notice that or they always think about those two letters as separated when using it for the state ?

Oh, lovely polymorphic untameable languages! :-)

Interesting in translation vol. 2

A silly wordplay in italian: "Qual'e' il contrario di abbondantemente ?" (what is the opposite of abbondantemente ?) And the answer would be "aberlinopetrarcadicelaverita'".

Dante and Petrarca,
painted by Giovanni dal Ponte

And now we are going to see its silliness.
Lets start it the literal translation: abbondantemente means "plenty"... but aberlinopetrarcadicelaverita' has no meaning, at least not in italian.
...So where is the joke ?
The joke is in cutting down the words in smaller ones; for abbondantemente we have
abbon = in Bonn
dante = Dante Alighieri (the greatest italian poet)
mente = tells lies;
while for aberlinopetrarcadicelaverita' we have:
aberlino = in Berlin
petrarca = Francesco Petrarca (another of the greatest italian poets and almost contemporary to Dante)
dicelaverita' = tells the true.


Now the question is if this post is silly enough to keep me awake in a dull and rainy Sunday afternoon ?

Interesting in translation vol. 1

Languages are wonderful things, so different as cultures and histories are varied but still so similar as they are still the same thing, the instrument with humans try to communicate with each other. I'm not a linguist but i still like to learn things about languages and noticing differences and similarities between them on my own.

That said I'm thinking about a series of posts about the interesting, curious, funny and nice (or not so nice) things about languages i found.I will write mainly about the two languages i know better, italian (my own language) and english, but i may wander around to languages i don't know but I've read something about (and i will probably make a fool of myself doing that).

I'll start with one of the most famous italian word: ciao.
Ciao is the main informal greeting in italian, used both when meeting and when leaving people. The thing i find interesting about it is that not many people (not even italians) know its meaning and origin (maybe ciao wikipedia page may help it).  Ciao comes from venetian language as a contraption of  "sciào vostro" or "sciào su" and both can be translated as "I'm your slave".  But when it was borrowed by italian it completely lost even the faintest idea of putting yourself at someone service and now it does only carry the greeting meaning.

Image used under Creative Commons from xueexueg.