BOOK: Giovanni Marrasio, "Angelinetum and Other Poems"

Giovanni Marrasio: Angelinetum and Other Poems. Translated by Mary P. Chatfield. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 73. Harvard University Press, 2016. 9780674545021. xx + 291 pp.

Of the poets whose work I've read in the I Tatti Renaissance Library so far, most aren't exactly household names nowadays, but even so, Marrasio seems to be one of the more obscure among them. He doesn't seem to have a wikipedia page at all, not even in the Italian wikipedia. I've never heard of him before picking up this book; fortunately there's an interesting biographical introduction about him by the translator. Marrasio lived in the first half of the 15th century; he was originally from Sicily, but spent a good deal of time in the north of Italy, especially in Siena and Ferrara. He also studied medicine in Padua and later worked as a physician in Palermo.

His Angelinetum is a short collection of poems mostly inspired by his love for Angela Piccolomini, a woman from a prominent Sienese family. (The best-known member of this family, of course, is Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who would later become pope Pius II; Marrasio praises him in one of his poems (CV XII), and in the appendix of this book there's also a poem by Enea Silvio that includes a favourable mention of Marrasio (p. 205).)

In his poems, he praises Angelina in the most extravagant terms, constantly describing her as “divine” and the like (A II–IV). She doesn't seem to have given him too much encouragement, perhaps because his ancestry was not illustrious enough or because, being from Sicily, he was something of an outsider in Siena; or perhaps that's just Marrasio's insecurity speaking (A VII). There's also the inevitable poem reminding her that she won't be young and beautiful for very long (A VI). The rest of the Angelinetum includes two poems addressed to Leonardo Bruni and one to Tommaso Piccolomini, Marrasio's friend (who was presumably related to Angelina, but we don't learn exactly how).

I liked this passage from A IV, ll. 1–10, where he uses mythological references to illustrate the intensity of his love for her: “If someone armed with shield and gleaming spear be your pleasure,/ [. . .] seek out warlike Mars; [. . .] If abundance of wealth should stir your soul,/ You should seek out Midas [. . .] But if anyone should seem worthy to be loved for his love,/ No one can be more smitten than Marrasio.” He ends this poem by saying: “Please pay me the love I rightly ask of you in return,/ And don't hand me payment with that grudging look.” (Ll. 27–8.) This idea that she should love him because he loves her so intensely strikes me as a bit naive; I don't think that's quite how this works. And trying to make her feel guilty would probably be counter-productive if anything: “Angelina, who has never taken pity on my sorrows,/ Look at me: I am dying” (A VII, ll. 1–2). But then he probably knew all that and was just following a well-established convention like so many other poets.

The rest of this book consists of Marrasio's miscellaneous poems (Carmina Varia = CV), arranged in roughly chronological order. Many are addressed to his various friends and acquaintances and mostly didn't strike me as terribly memorable. Some were written in an effort to obtain patronage, though without success; see e.g. the poem for Niccolo d'Este, the marquis of Ferrara (whose execution of his wife Parisina would later inspire one of Byron's beautiful narrative poems). Marrasio had organized a masque at his court, and wrote a few poems about the history of masques and of the theatre in general (CV XVII, XVIII, and a prose commentary on the former, printed here in the appendix on p. 221). I was interested to learn that (at least according to what the ancient Greeks had written about the origins of their theatre) the use of masks in the theatre was an innovation by Aeschylus; before that, actors would smear their faces with lees (sediments that form during fermentation of wine).

Several of Marrasio's poems are addressed to pope Nicholas V. One of these (CV XXIV) praises his programme of translating Greek works into Latin, and even goes so far as to say that Homer “does not wish to wander farther among his own Maeonian cities; he wants to dwell in Latin homes” (ll 55–6), the Iliad “[p]refers to emigrate through your agency into the Latin tongue/ Rather than dwell anymore in Greek houses” (ll. 61–2). What a bizarre idea; what sort of author would prefer to see his work circulate in translation rather than in the original?...

There's also a longish poem (CV XXVIII) praising Nicholas's success in “the dissolution of the schismatic Council of Basel” (translator's note, p. 256) and celebrating 1450 as a jubilee year. Among the countless pilgrims who came to Rome on that occasion, there was also an envoy/abbot from India, apparently from the fabled kingdom of Prester John, who told many fascinating things about his exotic homeland — or so Marrasio tells us in the charming middle part of the poem (ll. 43–94), but sadly the whole episode seems to be completely fictional. In another poem to the same pope (CV XXIX), Marrasio calls for a crusade against the Turks, who were a looming threat to christendom at that time (this was shortly before the fall of Constantinople in 1453).

Later in life, Marrasio suffered from various health problems, fell from a mule, got malaria, etc., and he complains about these things at very considerable length in several poems here (CV XXX–XXXII). There is a touching episode where his bride died from the plague and was followed a day later by her brother: “While he lived, he inhaled his sister's contagious breath/ And made himself her companion in death as in life.” (CV XXXII, ll. 11–12.)

There is also a very interesting poem about the death of a knight named Garcia, the brother of Alfonso di Cuevasruvias, the archbishop of Monreale; he fell with his horse while hunting, injured his head badly and died soon afterwards (CV XXXVI). The archbishop was a friend and something of a patron of Marrasio's, who also wrote several epitaphs for the unfortunate knight (CV XXXVIII–XL). The interesting part is the detailed and suitably gory description of the trepanation by which they tried to treat Garcia's injury: “They cut back the skin along with the flesh and lay bare/ Hidden fissures with their nails, so as to cut them off./ After the saw has made its round cuts on all sides,/ A burr hole was made by extracting bits of bone;/ From the vent poured out a hot wave of seething blood” (CV XXXVI, ll. 29–33) etc. Brrrr. This is what happens when you let doctors write poetry :P

There are also a few poems by other authors, addressed to Marrasio. For example, there's a short poem by his fellow Sicilian poet, the infamous Antonio Panormita, who praises Angelina in just the terms you would expect from him: “Her mouth breathes nectar, her head ambrosia, her breast amomum,/ And, what I don't say, her cunt is fragrant with balsam.” (CV A, ll. 3–4). Marrasio himself doesn't usually write in the dirty style that Panormita was so fond of, except in one poem addressed to Panormita (CV XXI). In the appendix there's also a prose letter from Marrasio to Panormita, in which the former complains: “I am living in Padua, the filthiest of towns and the shit of city-states” :))) (P. 213.)

There's also an interesting prose letter (CV D) from Leonardo Bruni that includes a discussion of the four forms of “divine madness” (or “mania”, from Plato's Phaedrus) — prophecy, mystery, poetry, and love (¶4). He has a fine defense of poetry on this basis: “not every literary production is a poem”, but only if it is “brought forth by a kind of divine inspiration. And so, by as much as prophecy surpasses guesswork in dignity, so much should a poem, because it comes into being by [divine] madness, be ranked before the contrivances of sober men” (¶6). “[I]t might be said no less truly than elegantly that the soul of the lover lives in another's body” (¶10). “[N]o poet can be good unless seized by such madness, nor can anyone who makes predictions foresee the future unless by madness of this sort, nor can god be worshipped perfectly and excellently unless by that same alienation of mind” (¶11).

Like often in the ITRL series, this book was nothing to write home about, but you can still get plenty of interesting things out of it with a small bit of effort. Since that's about as much as I dare to expect from these books at this point, I can't say that I was in any way dissatisfied. If you look at the book as a whole, you could think of it as a sort of chronicle of Marrasio's life — a “lifetime of disappointment” (translator's introduction, p. xix), which can hardly fail to provoke sympathy. It was nice to get to know a poet that was previously quite unknown to me, and I can't help wondering how many other such poets lurk about in the mists of literary history, waiting for someone to bring them to my attention.