Today we read Era ’l giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro, by Girolamo Malipiero.

The influence of Petrarch on Italian poetry can only be understated, and yet it still surprising sometimes to see the lengths to which some later poets went in their dialogue with him.

In the early 1500s a Venetian friar, Girolamo Malipiero, decided that his poetic master had been in error to dedicate so much of his art to sing his secular love, and took it upon himself to turn Petrarch’s sonnets into a more proper, religious form. The process entailed taking a sonnet from the Canzoniere, keeping one or a few verses unchanged (typically the first), keeping also all the rhyme words, but then rewrite the rest as a devotional poem.

It is unfortunate that I haven’t prepared yet a page for the original of the sonnet I’m presenting now, but it can be read here.

In the original, Petrarch describes his fateful first encounter with Laura, when he fell in love with her and the story told in his Canzoniere started. He sees her, and his defenses against Love are down, so Love binds him in a net of sorrows to come.

Both sonnets start with the same two lines, describing how the meeting happened “when the sun lost his light because of its pain for his maker” — a roundabout way to refer to the Passion of Christ. It was Good Friday, April 6, 1327.

What for Petrarch was the start of a secular love story, in Malipiero becomes the religious conversion: looking at Jesus on the Cross, he becomes prisoner of the Greatest Love.

The original: