Ariosto's "Ad Petrum Bembo" (c.1500)

 

In an earlier post on this blog (‘The Latin “Ad Vilmum Axiologum” (1807): Coleridge and Ariosto’) I talked about how Coleridge, stung by what he had seen—or perhaps, by what he had hallucinated—on the morning of Boxing Day 1806, ran out of the house and into a nearby tavern, where he spent the day drinking and scribbling-out his agony into his notebook under the portentous title ‘THE EPOCH’. What had he seen? Wordsworth in bed, naked, with Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's wife's sister, and the object of STC's profound and unreciprocated desire. Coleridge later tore-out most of these pages and destroyed them, but references to the events recur in his notes and poems for many years. How could Wordsworth cheat on his wife? How, more importantly, could Wordsworth betray him? How could Asra?

The main focus of that earlier blogpost was one such later reaction to ‘THE EPOCH’, the Latin ‘Ad Vilmum Axiologum’ (‘To William Wordsworth’), a blistering poem of hurt and rebuke aimed at his friend.

Me n'Asrae perferre jubes oblivia? et Asrae
Me aversos oculos posse videre meae?
Scire et eam falsam, crudelem, quae mihi semper
Cara fuit, semper cara futura mihi?
Meque pati lucem, cui vanam perdite amanti,  [5]
Quicquid Naturae est, omne tremit, titubat?
Cur non ut patiarque fodi mea viscera ferro,
Dissimulato etiam, Vilme, dolore jubes?
Quin Cor, quin Oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod
Carius est, si quid carius esse potest!               [10]
Deficientem animam, quod vis, tolerare jubebo,
Asrae dum superet, me moriente, fides
At Fidis Inferias vidi! et morior!—Ratione
Victum iri facili, me Ratione, putas?
Ah pereat, qui in Amore potest rationibus uti!   [15]
Ah pereat, qui, ni perdite, amare potest!
Quid deceat, quid non, videant quihus integra mens est:
Vixi! vivit adhuc imraemor ASRA mei.

Here's how I translated this poem, in that original blogpost:

You command me to endure Asra's neglect? and Asra's
eyes turned from me, something I see very well for myself?
To know her to be false, cruel, who to me has always
been dear, who always will be dear to me?
I must endure this light: I've vainly loved a false woman, [5]
at which the whole of Nature trembles and stutters?
Why not order my own bowels stabbed with a sword,
and then pretend, William, that it does not hurt?
Why not tear out my heart, or my own eyes, or something else
that is even dearer, if anything is dearer!                          [10]
I'd command my weary soul to endure anything,
if only Asra, though it killed me, remained faithful.
But I've seen the funeral of her fidelity! and I'm dying!—Reason
is too easily defeated, you really think Reason can help me?
Ah, perish the man who can subordinate love to reason!    [15]
Ah, perish any man who does not love to perdition!
What's decent, what's not, let the sane decide on that:
My life is over! Though ASRA lives on, unmindful of me.

In that earlier blog I showed that this poem is not an original composition, but appropriates and reworks Ariosto's early 16th-century poem, ‘Ad Petrum Bembo’ (‘To Pietro Bembo’). What I'm doing in this blog is digging a little deeper into that.

Here's the whole of Ariosto's poem, together with my new translation:

Me tacitum perferre meae peccata puellae?
    Me mihi rivalem praenituisse pati?
Cur non ut patiarque fodi mea viscera ferro
    dissimulato etiam, Bembe, dolore iubes?
Quin cor, quin oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod        [5]
    carius est, siquid carius esse potest.
Deficienteni animam quod vis tolerare iubebo,
    dum superet dominae me moriente fides.
Obsequiis alius faciles sibi quaerat amores,
    cautius et vitet tetrica verba nece;                              [10]
qui spectare suae valeat securus amicae
    non intellecta livida colla nota;
quique externa toro minimi vestigia pendat,
    dum sibi sit potior parvo in amore locus.
Me potius fugiat nullis mollita querelis,                          [15]
    dum simul et reliquos Lydia dura procos.
Parte carere omni malo, quam admittere quemquam
    in partem; cupiat Iuppiter, ipse negem.
Tecum ego mancipiis, mensa, lare, vestibus utar;
    communi sed non utar, amice, toro.                              [20]
Cur ea mens mihi sit, quaeris fortasse, tuaque
    victum iri facili me ratione putas.
Ah! pereat qui in amore potest rationibus uti!
    Ah! pereat qui ni perdite amare potest.
Quid deceat, quid non, videant quibus integra mens est; [25]
    sat mihi, sat dominam posse videre meam.

Am I to endure in silence my girl's cheating?
    To permit my rival outshining me?
Why not order me to stab my guts with an iron knife
    all the while hiding, Bembo, my agony?
Why not rip-out my heart, or my eyeballs, or                  [5]
    something dearer to me (if anything is dearer)? 
I'd order my drooping spirit to bear up,
    if only my mistress stayed true til I died.
Let another man easily surrender to his lover,
    dodging harsh words like death to keep love alive;    [10]
watching with eyes, trusting his lover, though he
    can't comprehend the strange lovebites on her neck;
overlooking signs a stranger has shared her bed,
    so long as he feels she loves him more, or as much.
Fine if she blanks me, if my begging doesn't soften her— [15]
    hard-hearted Lydia—if she avoids her other men too.
I'd rather lose the whole, than to let anyone else
    have any part; if Jupiter himself desired her, I'd say no.
I'll share my slaves, my table, house, my clothes;
    with you my friend, but not my bed!                               [20]
Why do I say so, you ask? You might think you could
    cool my anger with a piece of your clever logic.
Ah! may the man perish who measures love by logic!
    Ah! may he perish if love doesn't absolutely slay him!
Let the clear-sighted concern themselves with propriety;   [25]
    for me, all I care about is seeing my mistress.

You can see that Coleridge has done two things to Ariosto's poem. One is swapping the names: Vilme for Bembe (addressing William rather than Bembo) and specifying Asra as the puella in question. The other is condensing the poem from 26 to 16 lines. This latter is achieved by a process of selection, filling in gaps with Coleridge's own Latin. So: STC’s first line adapts Ariosto’s opening line. Lines 2-6 are STC’s own. His lines 7-10 are Ariosto’s lines 3-6 and his lines 11-13 are a bridge to Ariosto’s line 22 (which STC reworks as his lines 14-15). The last four lines are, name-change aside, the same as Aristo’s last four lines. (The linking passages are not exactly original Coleridgean compositions either: for instance line 5's puella perdite amanti, I have loved a worthless girl, is Propertius Elegies 2.1. But I shan't get into all that here).        

Ariosto's poem was a response to a short poem by his friend Bembo, ‘Ad Melinum’. I won't quote it (it's on the other end of that link if you're interested) but here's John Grant's summary of it:

The speaker, adopting the role of praeceptor amoris, advises the addressee, who is to be identified with the poet Pietro Mellini, to stop accusing or suspecting his lover of infidelity. For if he does not do so, he will lose her (lines 1-4). The central section of the poem (5-12) expands upon this advice. Puellae [girls] are by nature infirmae [weak] and can be seduced by blandae preces [smooth or beguiling entreaties]. Men should recognize that fact, but pretend to be unaware of it. That is how a love affair lasts. In the concluding four lines the speaker brings his own situation into the poem. “If I saw my girl friend being unfaithful,” he says, “I would not want to admit to it.” And he closes by addressing Mellini again as he had at the beginning, urging him to follow his example and comforting him with the assurance that he is worrying needlessly; the situation he fears will not arise. [John N. Grant, ‘Propertius, Ovid and Two Latin Poems of Pietro Bembo’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1:4 (1995), 51]

This smoothly cynical attitude to love and sex provokes Ariosto's impassioned retort. 

It's not clear to me if Coleridge was aware of both poems, or had only read Ariosto's. This matters, since it speaks, at least potentially, to the circumstances out of which Coleridge wrote, or adapted, his poem. Did Wordsworth, having been discovered by Coleridge in flagrante with Asra, adopt a Bembo-like suavity? He might have said something like ‘yes I slept with her, but, come now! We're both men of the world. You know what women are like, don’t get so het-up, be rational’ and so on. This doesn't strike me as impossible, although it also doesn't seem to me particularly likely. It's surely more probable that Wordsworth pressed the ‘you were drunk, or opiated, and imagined the whole thing’ line. 

The vision, whatever it was, wouldn't leave Coleridge alone. I assume he was reading neo Latin poetry (as we know he was doing in this period, pursuant to his plan to publish his own translations of select neo-Latin poets) and came across this poem. We can picture him caught by its applicability to his situation with Wordsworth and Asra, copying it out and adapting it as he did to point-up that specificity. Yet Coleridge's poem is (I'm suggesting) different to Ariosto's tonally, characterised by its earnest outrage and sincerity. I'm not sure Ariosto's original is especially sincere (hence my going to the bother of restranslating it). For instance: the couplet ‘Quin cor, quin oculosque meos, quin erue vel quod/carius est, siquid carius esse potest’ [5-6] (which Coleridge copies across) involves, we can assume, a comically oblique reference to Ariosto's prick. And more than that, it's a recycled joke, riffing off Catullus 82:

Quinti, si tibi vis oculos debere Catullum
aut aliud si quid carius est oculis,
eripere ei noli multo quod carius illi
est oculis seu quid carius est oculis.

Quintus, if you want Catullus to owe you his eyes
or another thing (if there is one) dearer than his eyes,
do not steal from him that which he holds dearer
than his eyes or the things dearer even than eyes.

Catullus is begging Quintus not to steal his girl. You might as well (he says) rob me of my eyes, or of my balls, which are of course even more important than my eyes! The joke here is: being cuckolded is emasculating, a kind of castration. I mean I say that: older commentators (E T Merrill et al), a little prudishly, suggest that the thing that is more valuable to Catullus than his eyes is his love, Lesbia. That's not what the poem actually says, though (it says his eyes are dear to him, the things that are dearer to his eyes are dearer, and Lesbia is dearer still than both). Plus it's surely funnier the first way.

That said: I don't get that Catullian vibe from Coleridge's poem. There's nothing ribald, even in a coded way, about this expression of his anguish over Asra, here, I'd say.

There's more to say, perhaps, about the extent to which, or perhaps about whether, Coleridge saw in Ariosto's relationship with Bembo his own relationship to Wordsworth—beyond, that is, the fact that Bembo seems to have shagged Ariosto's girlfriend, I mean. Bembo was an important cultural figure, a collector and arbiter of taste, wealthy and well-connected. Ariosto, as a poet, wrote often in Latin; it was Bembo who persuaded him to write his masterpiece, the Orlando Furioso, in Italian (strictly, in Tuscan). Both men were what we might, to use the anachronistic term, playboys, but Bembo's mistresses were of a higher class than Ariosto (he had a famous, or notorious, affair with Lucrezia Borgia for instance). But if Coleridge is Ariosto in terms of wounded sexual feeling, Wordsworth is Ariosto in terms of epic ambition. Coleridge of course is a major poet, but he himself always ceded to Wordsworth the true poetic laurels, and took the Bembo role of advice and exhortation whe it came to his friend's ‘philosophical epic’.  It's a complex set of conflicting identifications, actually.