Nine Irish Madrigals

Like the Eight Irish Madrigals these Nine Irish Madrigals, also for soprano and tenor, but with a different accompaniment, come from my Third Book of Madrigals - which is for three voices and lute.

These all set sonnets by Petrarch in the remarkable Irish prose translations by John Millington Synge. I came across Synge's Petrarch poems in the University of Victoria library, part of a remarkable Synge collection. They were edited by one of Canada’s greatest poets Robin Skelton, who died in 1997 and to whose memory these madrigals are dedicated.

Although Synge first became interested in Petrarch when he visited Italy in 1896 it was not until early 1907, after he had met the American poetess Agnes Tobin and read her translations, that he began to work on his own versions. Part of his intention was to translate love poetry into English but they also served as an exercise in writing prose poetry of the kind he could use in his last play Deirdre of the Sorrows, which he wrote in parallel with the Petrarch translations. Both the play and the translations were incomplete at the time of his death in March 1909.

Petrarch’s sonnets are traditionally divided into two collections: in vita di Madonna Laura and in morte di Madonna Laura, and Synge’s settings are from the second group. During the time that he was writing them he became aware that he did not have long to live and the opening lines of the first poem show this: "Life is flying from me, not stopping an hour".

Only eight translations from Petrarch appeared in the edition of Synge’s Poems and Translations published two weeks after his death and each was given a title in imitation of Petrarch. When four more were added in the Collected Works in 1910 more were included and four of these had titles in a different hand than Synge's. Robin Skelton added titles to five more in his 1961 edition of Synge’s translations.

I am grateful to Robin Skelton’s family for allowing me to include these titles.

Gavin Bryars