Petrarch’s Canzoniere stands as one of the greatest and most influential collections of love poetry ever written. In a classic story of love at first sight, the young poet expresses in beautiful verse his unrequited reverence for Laura, a muse who would prove as inspirational as Beatrice to Dante. Stricken with grief after Laura’s death, Petrarch transmuted his sorrow onto the page and continued working on the Canzoniere until his own passing. At once movingly romantic and grandly meditative, always present within Petrarch’s lines is a tension between his earthly desire and his spiritual longing for divine grace.
In this monumental translation, renowned poet A.M. Juster preserves the original text’s formal elegance, honoring Petrarch’s rhyme and meter while also capturing the profound religious and philosophical undertones that imbue the work. This version, along with a panoramic introduction by Andrew Frisardi, highlights its classical roots and contemporary sensibilities. Juster, a celebrated poet and translator, brings Petrarch’s vision to life with precision and grace, offering a rendition that is both faithful to the original and eminently accessible to contemporary readers.
Andrew Frisardi is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. In 2013, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for annotated translations of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Convivio. He lives in Lazio, Italy, and Boston.
A.M. Juster is the nom de plume of poet, translator, and critic Michael J. Astrue. His first book of poetry, The Secret Language of Women, won the 2002 Richard Wilbur Award. He has also won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award three times as well as the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Astrue had a long career in the federal government, where he worked in senior positions for four presidents. From 2007 to 2013, he was commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
Kate van Orden is Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University. She specializes in the cultural history of early modern France, Italy, and the Mediterranean, book history, and popular music (mostly 16th-c, but also in the 1960s). Her latest book is Songs in Unexpected Places, on polyglot singing, cultural mobility, and foreign communities in Cinquecento Italy. She is the President of the International Musicological Society (2022–2027) and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Music.
Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and co-chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, of Renaissance Woman, a biography of Vittoria Colonna, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
LOCATION: STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20261005T220000Z DTEND:20261005T233000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR