Francesco Petrarca - Sonette - übersetzt und ausgewählt von Carl Streckfuss

Francesco Petrarch's sonnets invented the vocabulary of love itself. Written across nearly half a century and addressed to the unattainable Laura, these 366 poems trace the entire arc of obsession, longing, and spiritual torment that would define Western lyric poetry for six hundred years. Carl Streckfuss's 1804 selection gathers forty-two of the finest examples, preserving the originals alongside his German translations. Here is poetry that burns with physical desire yet trembles before Christian guilt, that finds the beloved's face in every landscape and her absence in every season. Petrarch gave poetry its most powerful subject: the self in love with its own suffering, unable to desire without simultaneously wishing to transcend desire. These sonnets are the source from which Shakespeare, Dante, and every lovesick poet downstream have drawn. To read them is to understand where modern feeling begins.