Giambattista Marino

Giambattista Marino Poems

Giambattista Marino Biography

Giambattista Marino (also Giovan Battista Marino) (18 October 1569 – 25 March 1625) was an Italian poet who was born in Naples. He is most famous for his long epic L'Adone. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature thought him to be "one of the greatest Italian poets of all time". He is considered the founder of the school of Marinism, later called Secentismo, characterised by its use of extravagant and excessive conceits. Marino's conception of poetry, which exaggerated the artificiality of Mannerism, was based on an extensive use of antithesis and a whole range of wordplay, on lavish descriptions and a sensuous musicality of the verse, and enjoyed immense success in his time, comparable to that of Petrarch before him. He was widely imitated in Italy, France (where he was the idol of members of the précieux school, such as Georges Scudéry, and the so-called libertins such as Tristan l'Hermite), Spain (where his greatest admirer was Lope de Vega) and other Catholic countries, including Portugal and Poland, as well as Germany, where his closest follower was Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau. In England he was admired by John Milton and translated by Richard Crashaw. He remained the reference point for Baroque poetry as long as it was in vogue. In the 18th and 19th centuries, while being remembered for historical reasons, he was regarded as the source and exemplar of Baroque "bad taste". With the 20th century renaissance of interest in similar poetic procedures his work has been reevaluated: it was closely read by Benedetto Croce and Carlo Calcaterra and has had numerous important interpreters including Giovanni Pozzi, Marziano Guglielminetti, Marzio Pieri and Alessandro Martini. Le Rime (1602) and La lira (1614) Marino originated a new, "soft, graceful and attractive" style for a new public, distancing himself from Torquato Tasso and Renaissance Petrarchism as well as any kind of Aristotelian rule. His new approach can be seen in the Rime of 1602, later expanded under the title La lira (The Lyre) in 1614, which is made up of erotic verse, encomiastic and sacred pieces, arranged either by theme (sea poems, rustic poems, love poems, funereal poems, religious poems) or by verse form (madrigal, canzone). They often hark back to the Classical traditions of Latin and Greek literature, with a particular fondness for the love poems of Ovid and the Dolce stil nuovo tradition of Italian verse, showing a strong experimental tension with anti-Petrachan tendencies. In 1620 Marino published La Sampogna, a collection of poems divided into two parts: one consisting of pastoral idylls and another of "rustic" verse. Thus Marino distanced himself from love, heroic and sacred themes in favour of the mythological and bucolic. L'Adone Title page of L'Adone L'Adone (Adonis), which was published in Paris in 1623 and dedicated to the French king Louis XIII, is a mythological poem written in ottava rima divided into twenty cantos. The poem deals with the love of the goddess Venus for Prince Adonis, who escapes from a sea storm to take refuge on the island of Cyprus, the site of the goddess's palace. Cupid uses his arrows to make his mother and Adonis fall in love with one another. Adonis listens to Cupid and Mercury telling love stories and is then led to the Garden of Pleasure, which is divided into five parts, one for each of the senses, and to the fountain of Apollo. Jealousy warns the god Mars of Venus's new love and he heads for Cyprus. When Adonis finds out Mars is on his way, he flees and is transformed into a parrot for refusing the goddess's love. Having regained his human form thanks to Mercury, he is taken captive by a band of robbers. Adonis returns to Cyprus where he wins a contest of beauty, is made ruler of the island and is reunited with Venus. But Mars has Adonis killed on a hunting expedition by a wild boar. He dies in the arms of Venus and his heart is transformed into a red flower, the anemone. The poem ends with a long description of the funeral games in honour of the dead youth. [edit] Narrative technique Into this flimsy framework Marino inserts the most famous stories from mythology, including the Judgement of Paris, Cupid and Psyche, Echo and Narcissus, Hero and Leander, Polyphemus and numerous others. Thus the poem, which was originally intended to be only three cantos in length, was so enriched that it became one of the longest epics in Italian literature, made up of 5123 eight-line stanzas (40,984 verses), an immense story with digressions from the main theme and descriptive pauses. All this tends to characterise “L’Adone” as a labyrinth of entangled situations without any real structure. The lengthy Canto XX, which takes place after the protagonist's death, serves to undermine any pretence to narrative unity. But this very lack of unity constitutes Marino's narrative innovation. The poet composes his work using various levels and passes from one episode to the next without any apparent logical connection, basing the links solely on a language rich in hyperboles, antitheses and metaphors. In Adone, Marino quotes and rewrites passages from Dante's Divine Comedy, Ariosto, Tasso and the French literature of the day. The aim of these borrowings is not plagiarism but rather to introduce an erudite game with the reader who must recognise the sources and appreciate the results of the revision. Marino challenges the reader to pick up on the quotations and to enjoy the way in which the material has been reworked, as part of a conception of poetic creation in which everything in the world (including the literature of the past) can become the object of new poetry. In this way, Marino also turns Adone into a kind of poetic encyclopaedia, which collects and modernises all the previous productions of human genius. The poem is also evidence of a new sensibility connected with the latest scientific discoveries (see for example the eulogy of Galileo in Canto X) and geographical findings (such as Canto VII with its praise of the passiflora, a plant recently imported into Europe from the Americas). Thus Adone, in spite of its technical virtuosity, is a work rich in authentic poetry written in a style which often achieves perfection of rhythm.)

The Best Poem Of Giambattista Marino

Sobre El Retrato De La Mano De Schidoni

Tome el hielo y el brillo, ellos son sólo
con cada miedo de poderes marrones de la sombra;
también de la palidez de muerte,
a condición de que esto usted pueda, a la mezcla extraña;

Tome lo que rescates de la oscuridad sobre el rastro negro,
en el dolor y la oscuridad entreteje
la amargura querida, el nunca deseaba la
Suerte, la miseria de naturaleza inacabada;

Veneno de jeringa en de serpientes seleccionadas
se se mezcla y añade
A los colores de los suspiros y las muchas preocupaciones,

Entonces se hace, Schidoni, la verdad y no la mentira
esté mi retrato. Pero esto debería vivir,
entonces usted no puede darle la vivacidad.

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