Selected Poems from Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian and English)

Long before the world knew him as the sculptor of David or the painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo wrote poetry in the quiet hours before dawn. These are not the works of a man who dabbled. Spanning his later decades, the 300-plus poems that survive reveal a writer obsessed with beauty, mortality, and the cruel distance between the vision in his mind and the stone or canvas he left behind. Written primarily as sonnets and madrigals, they range from tender love poems addressed to young men who inspired him to raw meditations on aging, where he laments that his hand now trembles and his beloved art has become 'a burden.' The bilingual format presented here allows readers to hear the original Italian's rough music alongside translators' attempts to preserve its force. These are not decorative verses from a master craftsman. They are the confessions of a man who spent eighty-nine years trying to make his hands obey his eyes, and failing, and trying again. For anyone who has ever felt the anguish of creation, this collection offers something rare: proof that genius and self-doubt are not opposites, but companions.