The Poetry of Petrarch
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004)

“David Young’s version of Petrarch will refresh our images of the West’s crucial lyric poet. We are given a Petrarch in our own vernacular, with echoes of Wyatt, Shakespeare, and many who come after.”
—Harold Bloom

“To read love poetry—to speak of the language of love—is to read Petrarch, who is largely responsible for inventing what W. B. Yeats called ‘the old high way of love.’ David Young has made the old way new again: his translation is limpid, uncluttered, rhythmically alive, and above all, readable. Lovers of poetry will discover here the language they have spoken all their lives.”
—James Longenbach

“True love—or rather, the truest—is always obsessive and unrequited. No one has better dramatized how it scorches the heart and fires the imagination than Petrarch did, centuries ago. He dipped his pen in tears and wrote the poems that have shaped our sense of love—its extremes of longing and loss—ever since. Now in David Young’s elegant new versions, his songs are as soaring and searing as ever. Indeed, not only is this a vibrant translation for our day but, their immense range slowly savored, these poems will also sound anew the depths of each reader’s own heart.”
—J. D. McClatchy

“David Young’s new version of Petrarch makes this great poet seem closer to us than before, both in language and as a living presence. His marginal comments and introduction help to convey a coherent sense of Petrarch the man, his life, and the myth he made of it.”
—W. S. Merwin

This book was chosen as the year’s best translation by the Contemporary Poetry Review