harlowe gold

Malinconia, ninfa gentile
Malinconia, ninfa gentile,
la vita mia consacro a te;
I tuoi piaceri chi tiene a vile,
ai piacer veri nato non è.
Fonti e colline chiesi agli dei;
m'udiron alfine, pago io vivrò,
né mai quel fonte co' desir miei
né mai quel monte trapasserò.

Melancholy, gentle nymph,
I devote my life to you.
One who despises your pleasures
Is not born to true pleasures.
I asked the gods for fountains and hills;
They heard me at last; I will live satisfied
Even though, with my desires, I never
Go beyond that fountain and that mountain

- Vincenzo Bellini


while my knowledge of opera is resoundingly scant, i found the verse behind Bellini's aria too beautiful to pass up, so i went searching for other versions of the translation, and chanced upon one that didn't seem as.. ossified?

this is aghrivaine's handiwork:


Melancholy, gentle nymph,
I consecrate my life to you;
He who your pleasures despises,
To true pleasures is not born.

Mountains and hills I begged of God;
At last I was heard, and I will live content,
Never beyond the hills did I desire to go,
Never beyond the mountains will I go past.


much preferred.

it turns out aghrivaine's quite a character (i do love his phrasing!) - he describes his journal as"Quotidian
Loveliness: Observations of the everyday, the sublime, and the sublimely everyday."

these accidental meanderings really are the best, aren't they?

i was introduced to Malinconia, Ninfa Gentile while reading Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. the book deals with a bunch of high profile political/wealthy figures who find themselves kidnapped. along the way, they develop an uncertain relationship with their kidnappers, Stockholm Syndrome if you will.

music, or to be specific, opera, is unquenchably meshed with the book (hence, Bel Canto), with a main anchor in the form of Roxane Cross, a soprano whose aural prowess is tenderly described in many recurring moments, but particularly memorable in these:

"He looked instead to Roxane Cross, whose face he had tirelessly studied in program notes and CD inserts. Her shoulders were sloping. Her neck, perhaps, could be longer. A longer neck? He cursed himself. What was he thinking? None of it mattered. No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing, found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light through her skin...

..they were so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

... because of her singing, they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith."

- Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

though several elements in the plot remained highly questionable, Ms.Patchett has enabled even the most mundane of subjects to stretch out, an organic, languid undulation of potent emotions - and that, for me, matters the most. i'll be posting more excerpts from the book to be sure.

words of the day: quotidian, soliloquy, ossify