Thankfully my girl lived in Venice

If my heart's fire weren't tempered by          tears that pour forth so often from my eyes,          I'd already have seen death's messenger          lead forth my soul, quick to obey him; for hope now yields to fear, and every          inch of me is powerless before him;          you can see from a thousand different signs          that he who can make me suffer will do it. Thus if I live, it's thanks to my tears;          if I die, at fault's my lord's cruel desires,          the man who seems in looks to be so sweet. He's bound me so others can't untie me,          he alone wants to boast of my demise.          Oh, nameless and unworthy spoils!

Gaspara Stampa, ‘The Rime: 54.’ in The Complete Poems: the 1554 edition of the “Rime”, trans. Jane Tylus. 

   “O poco chiare & honorate spoglie”

If I, who am an abject, low-born woman,

Can bear within me such lofty fire,

Why should I not possess at least a little

Poetic power to tell it to the world?

If Love, with such a new unheard-of flint

Lifted me up where I could never climb,

Why cannot I, in an unusual way,

Make pain and pen be equal in myself?

If Love cannot do this by force of nature,

Perhaps as by a miracle he may

Passing and bursting every common measure.

How that can be, I cannot well explain

But yet I feel, because of my great fortune,

My heart imprinted with a strong new style.

Rime by Gaspara Stampa

Reign 2013-2017

Toby Finn Regbo as Francis Valois

If, a lowly, abject woman, I can carry within so sublime a flame, why shouldn’t I draw out at least a little of its style and vein to show the world? If love has lit a new and unheard-of spark to raise me up to a place I’d never gained, why, with equally uncommon skill, can’t it make my pen and pain the same? And if the force of sheer nature’s not enough, why then some miracle that often conquers, breaks, and ruptures every limit. How this could be, I can’t exactly say; I know only that my great destiny’s impressed upon my heart a sweet new style.

Gaspara Stampa, from Rime

November 18, 2023

ANNIVERSARI / Venezia celebra la poetessa Gaspara Stampa nel cinquecentenario della sua nascita

#ANNIVERSARI / #Venezia celebra la poetessa #GasparaStampa nel cinquecentenario della sua nascita Dal 17 al 19 maggio le celebrazioni per la nascita della celebre poetessa veneziana. In programma un convegno, proiezioni e letture

“Queste rive ch’amai sì caldamente”: Venezia celebra Gaspara Stampa nel cinquecentenario della sua nascita dal 17 al 19 maggio 2023 in varie sedi della città, in una serie di appuntamenti organizzati dall’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati), dal Centro Candiani, dal Circuito Cinema del Settore Cultura del Comune di Venezia, in collaborazione…

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[Un'idea di paradiso][Joan Silber]

Un’instancabile ricerca di nuovi paradisi dove poter iniziare una nuova vita. Un'idea di paradiso di Joan Silber

Il cerchio si apre con Alice, aspirante showgirl che incontra il futuro marito su una nave da crociera e va a vivere con lui in Francia, per poi abbandonarlo con l’intento di proseguire la carriera nella danza. La donna, tuttavia, soccomberà alle umiliazioni inflittele dal suo insegnante, Duncan, che a sua volta sarà abbandonato da Andre e proverà a consolarsi con Carl, un giovane cantante che…

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the book sale started today (it’s a swedish thing every february) and my favorite bookshop has 40% off of every book for only one day, so I went there and suffered in the crowd for an hour but came home with four books yay!

The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left. Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers? But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate. Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes--the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.) But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost) who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified. Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth. But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself, as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time. Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?" Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn't notice at all: so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure God's voice--far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence. It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young. Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you? Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission, as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa. What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death-- which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one's own first name behind, forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity. Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created. Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth--: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus, the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god has suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

The Second Elegy Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling; (a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window). But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?

Early successes, Creation's pampered favorites, mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,-- pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light, corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence, shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone: mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face and gather it back, into themselves, entire.

But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us: "Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you . . . "--what does it matter? he can't contain us, we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises in their face, and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance: new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart . . . alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the angels really reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves, or sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace of our essence in it as well? Are we mixed in with their features even as slightly as that vague look in the faces of pregnant women? They do not notice it (how could they notice) in their swirling return to themselves.

Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air. For it seems that everything hides us. Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand. We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind. And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us. You hold each other. Where is your proof? Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other, or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them. That gives me a slight sensation. But who would dare to exist, just for that? You, though, who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you: "No more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance, like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged: I am asking you about us. I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves, because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish; because underneath it you feel pure duration. So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace. And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances, the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the garden: lovers, are you the same? When you lift yourselves up to each other's mouth and your lips join, drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.

Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic gravestones? Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world? Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos. These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far, this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us. But that is the gods' affair."

If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock. Four our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did. And we can no longer follow it, gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where, measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? And even if one were to suddenly take me to its heart, I would vanish into its stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terror. And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can we make use of? Not Angels: not men, and the resourceful creatures see clearly that we are not really at home in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains some tree on a slope, that we can see again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street, and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed. Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for, the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart with difficulty stands before. Is she less heavy for lovers? Ah, they only hide their fate between themselves. Do you not know yet? Throw the emptiness out of your arms to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight. Yes, the Spring-times needed you deeply. Many a star must have been there for you so you might feel it. A wave lifted towards you out of the past, or, as you walked past an open window, a violin gave of itself. All this was their mission. But could you handle it? Were you not always, still, distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced, like a Beloved, came near to you? (Where could you contain her, with all the vast strange thoughts in you going in and out, and often staying the night.) But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough. Those, you almost envied them, the forsaken, that you found as loving as those who were satisfied. Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth. But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature into herself, as if there were not the power to make them again. Have you remembered Gaspara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl, whose lover has gone, might feel from that intenser example of love: ‘Could I only become like her?’ Should not these ancient sufferings be finally fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself? For staying is nowhere. Voices, voices. Hear then, my heart, as only saints have heard: so that the mighty call raised them from the earth: they, though, knelt on impossibly and paid no attention: such was their listening. Not that you could withstand God’s voice: far from it. But listen to the breath, the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence. It rushes towards you now, from those youthfully dead. Whenever you entered, didn’t their fate speak to you, quietly, in churches in Naples or Rome? Or else an inscription exaltedly impressed itself on you, as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa. What do they will of me? That I should gently remove the semblance of injustice, that slightly, at times, hinders their spirits from a pure moving-on. It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth, to no longer practice customs barely acquired, not to give a meaning of human futurity to roses, and other expressly promising things: no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands, and to set aside even one’s own proper name like a broken plaything. Strange: not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange to see all that was once in place, floating so loosely in space. And it’s hard being dead, and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels a little eternity. Though the living all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction. Angels (they say) would often not know whether they moved among living or dead. The eternal current sweeps all the ages, within it, through both the spheres, forever, and resounds above them in both. Finally they have no more need of us, the early-departed, weaned gently from earthly things, as one outgrows the mother’s mild breast. But we, needing such great secrets, for whom sadness is often the source of a blessed progress, could we exist without them? Is it a meaningless story how once, in the grieving for Linos, first music ventured to penetrate arid rigidity, so that, in startled space, which an almost godlike youth suddenly left forever, the emptiness first felt the quivering that now enraptures us, and comforts, and helps.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy from The Duino Elegies tr. A.S. Kline

Main masterlist🕊️

Generale🖋️

Gaspara Stampa not beating the Protestant allegations

Unhinged De Vulgari Eloquentia summary

Foscolo is just delulu

Genshin impact danteification @moonschocolate

Cose più serie 🖋️

Dante and Virgilio in the Camposanto affresco

Rare, new miracle of nature–– but neither new nor rare to that lord whom all the world goes about calling Love, and whose work surpasses every measure–– the value of my lord, who steals the prize from all others, conquering all of worth, alas, is vanquished only by my sorrow, a sorrow no one else’s breast endures. As much as he exceeds all other knights in beauty, courage, and nobility, so is he conquered by my faith, and me. O miracle of love, as yet unheard of! Grief no one will believe if they’ve not felt it! Alas, that I alone defeat the infinite!

gaspara stampa sonnet 91, trans. jane tylus

Novo e raro miracol di Natura; Ma non novo nè raro à quel Signore, Che’l mondo tutto và chiamando Amore, Che’l tutto adopra fuor d’ogni misura. Il valor, che de gli altri il pregio fura Del mio Signor, che vince ogni valore; È vinto, lassa, sol dal mio dolore, Dolor’, à petto à cui null’altro dura. Quant’ ei tutt’ altri Cavalieri eccede In esser bello, nobile, & ardito, Tanto è vinto da me, da la mia fede. Miracol fuor d’ Amor mai non udito, Dolor, che chi nol prova non lo crede; Lassa, ch’io sola vinco l’infinito.

La introducción es más bien pobre tanto en profundidad como en extensión y la cantidad de poemas seleccionados es escasa, pero siempre es interesante leer a poetas de los que no conoces nada (todavía más si se trata de mujeres de siglos pasados). La inclusión del texto italiano permite, si se quiere, escuchar la rima que se pierde en la traducción a endecasílabos blancos.

Ninguna de las tres me ha parecido especialmente memorable (muy probablemente debido a los pocos poemas que se incluyen), pero de todas maneras dejaré algunos de los que me gustaron.

Vittoria Colonna

Este nudo gentil que a mi alma aprieta desde que ya es inmortal tan alta causa, libra a mi corazón de aquellos males que a los amantes mueve a enfurecerse; pues no pinta la imagen falsa ahora el Amor en mi mente, ni me asalta el temor, ni la fecha áurea o de plomo entre el freno o la espuela, ata o empuja. Con firme fe en aquel estado inmóvil, un bello y fiel pensar me lo presenta, por encima de estrellas, hado o suerte. Ni un día menos desdeñoso, ni otro más altivo, mas siempre estable y santo: este amor que es el bueno, el firme, el cierto.

Cuando el gran resplandor por el oriente levanta el negro manto de la noche, y al hielo y sombra fría de la tierra los disuelve y ahuyenta con sus rayos: con las primeras cuitas, que mi sueño mitigó dulcemente, ahora me oprime: arroja sombra en todos mis placeres cuando en todos los otros la levanta. Así me fuerza la enemiga estrella a escapar de la luz y amar lo oscuro, a odiar la vida y desear la muerte. Luce en los míos si a otros ojos ciega, porque se abren las puertas, si los cierro, a la ocasión que hasta mi sol conduce.

Chiara Matraini

Estos vientos contrarios y tan fieros que a las olas golpean en las rocas, son cual de mi enemigo el gran orgullo contra mi alto y mi firme pensamiento. Y esas hórridas nubes tan sombrías, donde la tempestad más se enardece, son como mis congojas pesarosas, contra mi paz guerreros desalmados; y la cansada y débil navecilla que trunca está de más tiles y jarcias, sin timonel entre terribles ondas, como mi alma afligida, y de su estrella privada y separada de su anhelo, cuando el cielo su luz al alma esconde.

Gaspara Stampa

Al ver aparecer mi hermoso rayo ver me parece el sol cuando despunta; cuando luego conmigo dulce queda, parece el sol que sigue su viaje. Y tanta fuerza y dicha en mi alma tengo, y tanta muestro en el semblante entonces, como la hierba por el sol pintada en el más lindo mayo al mediodía. Cuando luego mi sol por fin se marcha, contemplo al otro, que descolorida deja la tierra yéndose a occidente, mas vuelve el otro y luz y vida vuelven; y de mi claro oriente iluminado cierto el partir, dudoso es el regreso.

Oh noche, para mí dichosa y clara más que el día más claro y más dichoso, noche digna de ser por las más grandes y raras mentes, no por mí, alabada. Tú de mi gozo has sido únicamente dispensadora fiel, tú la amargura de mi vida en dulzores has trocado al ponerme en los brazos que me anudan. Me faltó únicamente el convertirme en la dichosa Alcmena, a quien la Aurora en regresar tardó más de lo usado. Aunque tan grande bien, cándida noche decir de ti no pueda, porque entonces al canto el argumento vencería.

guys look at this extremely niche comparison i was thinking about today

gaspara stampa - rime, 95 // amy winehouse - tears dry on their own

and also!!

gaspara stampa - rime, 161 // amy winehouse - back to black

#iltempoimmobile . . . Se poteste, signor, con l'occhio interno penetrar i segreti del mio core, come vedete queste ombre di fuore apertamente con questo occhio esterno, vi vedreste le pene de l'inferno, un abisso infinito di dolore, quanta mai gelosia, quanto timore Amor ha dato o può dar in eterno. E vedreste voi stesso seder donno in mezzo a l'alma, cui tanti tormenti non han potuto mai cavarvi, o ponno; e tutti altri disir vedreste spenti, od oppressi da grave ed alto sonno, e sol quei d'aver voi desti ed ardenti. (Gaspara Stampa - Se poteste signor) #urbanexploring #kings_abandoned #abandoned_excellence #abandon_seekers #abandonedplaces #renegade_abandoned #total_abandoned #abandonedshots #ig_abandoned #urbandecay #urbexphotography #urbexworld #urbex_supreme #urbexpeople #urbex_kings #ig_urbex #jj_urbex #urbex_utopia #grime_lords #grime_nation #lostplaces #g_s_i #discarded_butnot_forgotten #urbex #decay #urbexplaces #urbexitalia #explore https://www.instagram.com/p/Co5aHkpAX0K/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=