Dear Giovanni,

Thank you for your enlightening discussion of the poem! Yet there are two
points where I beg to disagree: your interpretation of "vana vista" (v.11):

>perhaps the author eye is attracted by another woman, but the vision of
>Tarquinia Molza performing shows him that the other woman is a vana vista;
>if Tarquinia reveals to him her treasures (her beauty, her singing, dare we
>think of something else?) the author will be plunged in the peculiar icy 
>fire Petrarchan dichotomy [...]

And your suggestion that "o" in "o del nome Tiran degn(a)..., o qua giu
cieli aperti" (vv.13-14) might be a disjunctive conjunction ("either...,
or...") instead of a vocative/optative interjection.

As I understand the poem, it is built on the temporal distinction of past
(quatrains and first tercet), present (most pointedly in v.11) and future
(second tercet), and also implies a gradation of hearing (quatrains),
seeing (first tercet) and eventually touching (second tercet) the beloved,
i.e. Tarquinia. To explain:

The quatrains evoke the memory of a past event, T.'s performance as a
singer, and the effect of her voice on the audience ("altrui") and on the
lyrical subject, say, the lover.

The first tercet adds, in the form of a hypothetical-conditional clause the
memory of the visual effect of her outward appearance (esp. her face) in
this performance: 'So if the eye, which is *now* entangled by vane vision,
*then/once* did behold the mouvements' etc. This means, I understand "vana
vista" in the closing verse of this first tercet as a circumscription of
what is now ("or") present to the lover's eye in the absence of the
beloved, in accordance with the conventional (e.g. Petrachian) dichotomy of
presence/visibility/joy vs. absence/invisibility/privation as already
anticipated in the closing verse of the second quatrain ("mio cor, che via
da lei morendo giace").

The second tercet pursues this conditional clause further and also opens
the perspective to the future: 'So if one day she will deploy her treasures
to me...', meaning that T., who had already offered her face to the
eyesight, one day will eventually offer even more, 'beautiful treasures',
and these may consist either of more beauty to behold than just the face,
or may even include the 'tactus' as the final stage of (hedonistic) erotic
pleasure. What follows instead of a concluding "then..." are two
exclamations which leave the hypothetical construction unfinished, but
resume the contrast between present and future (in corrspondance to the
contrast of past and present as exposed in the quatrains and in the first
tercet) and hurry, so to speak, to the end: first the apostrophe to the
beloved, addressed as the cruel tyrant ('Tarquinius') and foe who presently
withholds these 'beautiful treasures' and (in her absence) the beauty of
her face and voice to the lover; next and finally the anticipating
appraisal of the pleasures which then, in the future, will be enjoyed:
eventually hedonistic pleasures which transgress the earlier joys of
hearing her voice and seeing her face, because the earlier joys had brought
the heart to heaven (but afterwards had left the lover in a world of
frustration), whereas the coming joys will bring heaven and paradise down
to earth.

I hope that I am not making too much (or the wrong sense) of this poem. But
it seems to me that it offers itself to a 'lectio facilior' which makes it
unnecessary to to see "vana vista" as an isolated reference to a second
woman, and which allows to read the three "o's" in the last two verses as
exclamatory interjections instead of seeing a more difficult construction
"either... or... and..." at work.

Yours,

  Otfried

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