After the war of divergent thoughts it chanced that this most graceful one came where many gentle ladies were gathered: to which place I was led by a friend, thinking to give me great delight, by showing me the place where so many ladies were displaying their beauty. So I, scarcely knowing where I was being taken, and trusting in the person who had conducted his friend to the extremity of life, said to him: ‘Why have we come to these ladies?’ Then he said to me: ‘To allow them to be worthily served.’
And the truth is that they were gathered in the company of a gentle lady who had been wedded that day: and so, following the custom of the city, it was necessary for them to keep her company the first time she sat at table in her husband’s house.
So I, believing that it would please this friend, decided to stay and attend upon the ladies in her company. And at the moment of my decision I seemed to feel a strange tremor start under my left breast and spread suddenly through all the parts of my body. Then I say I quietly leaned back against a fresco that ran round the walls of the house: and fearing lest others might be aware of my trembling, I raised my eyes, and gazing at the ladies, I saw the most graceful Beatrice among them.
Then my spirits were so scattered by the force that Love gained finding himself so near to the most graceful lady, that only the spirits of sight remained alive: and even they remained lost to their visual organs since Love wished to stand in their noblest of places to see the miraculous lady. And though I was other than at first, I grieved greatly for these little spirits who were lamenting loudly and saying: ‘If he had not shot us out of our place, we could have stayed to see the marvel of this lady as all our other parts have stayed.’
I say that many of those ladies aware of my transfiguration, then began to wonder, and then speak mockingly of me with this most gentle one: at which my friend, innocent of this in all good faith, took me by the hand, and led me from the sight of those ladies, then asked what troubled me.
Then, somewhat rested, and my mortal spirits revived, and those scattered returned to their possession, I said these words to that friend: ‘I have set foot in that region of life where it is not possible to go with any more intention of returning.’ And parting from him I returned to my chamber of tears: in which, weeping and shame-faced, I said to myself: ‘If my lady knew of my condition, I do not believe she would mock my person, in fact I believe she would inwardly feel much pity.’
And whilst in this state of weeping, I decided to speak words in which, speaking to her, I would explain the cause of my transfiguration, and say that I well knew that it was not known, and that, if it were known I believed that pity would be stirred in others: and I decided to speak desiring that it might come by chance to her ears. And then I wrote this sonetto, which begins: ‘Con l’altre donne’.
With the other ladies you mock my looks,
and do not think, lady, why it is
that I am seized by such a strange appearance
when I gaze upon your beauty.
If you knew, Pity could not be
held from me in the usual way,
that Amor, when he finds me so close to you,
gains so in boldness and temerity,
that he sets upon my frightened spirits,
and some he kills, and some he scatters,
till only he remains to gaze at you:
so that I change to another form,
but not so that I cannot then still hear
the wail of those tormented scattered ones.
I will not divide this sonetto into its parts, since the division is only made to clarify the sense of the thing so divided: so as this thing is such that in the telling the logic is clear enough, it does not need dividing. It is true that among the words in which the logic of this sonetto is shown, are written some obscure words, those where I say that Love kills all my spirits, and those of sight remain alive, except they flee their organs of vision. And this obscurity is impossible to explain to one who is not in a similar manner one of Love’s faithful: and to those who are it is obvious what clarifies the obscure words: and so it is no use for me to clarify that obscurity, since my words of clarification would be pointless, and indeed superfluous.
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