Terino Da Castel Fiorentino. “Sonnet. To Onesto di Boncima, in answer to the foregoing” [“Sonnet. He wishes that he could meet his Lady alone.”]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

General Description

Date: 1848?
Rhyme: ababcdcdefegfg
Meter: iambic pentameter
Genre: sonnet

Bibliography

“Table of Poets” (in Early Italian Poets) I. xxviii

◦ Contini, Poeti de Duecento, I. 363

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

Scholars are uncertain about the identity of this poet, who was a friend of Onesto di Boncima and who flourished in the later thirteenth and perhaps the early fourteenth-century. One manuscript assigns to him a sonnet written in response to the opening sonnet of the Vita Nuova.

DGR's source text was either Poeti del Primo Secolo (II. 154) or Raccolta di Rime Antiche Toscane (II. 377-378). The translation is at several points quite free, and DGR even departs sharply from the original rhyme scheme.

Textual History: Composition

Probably early, late 1840s or early 1850s.

Printing History

The translation was first published in 1861 in The Early Italian Poets; it was reprinted in 1874 in Dante and his Circle.

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: 105d-1861.raw.xml