LADY ON THE WEB

Miss Underwood and I are planning to read Petrarch's sonnets to his famed object of unrequited love, Laura (or Laureta). It took some doing to find a good translation of this masterwork. At first, Miss Underwood was disappointed in the version most readily available. However, in an e-mail correspondence, a professor and Petrarch scholar kindly recommended what were, in her estimation, the best modern translations, those of Robert Durling (Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics) and of Mark Musa (Petrarch: The Canzoniere, or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta).

This work contains three hundred and sixty-six poems: not just sonnets, of which there are three hundred and seventeen, but also twenty-nine canzone, nine sestinas, seven ballads and four madrigals. The last hundred were composed after Laura's death.