Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was many things: renegade monk, heretic, revolutionary, sorcerer, proto-scientist.  He suffered exceptionally brutal torture after a failed revolution against the Spanish authorities in Naples, and spent 28 years in prison.  There, he wrote most of his works, including the classic utopian fantasy, The City of the Sun.

He was also a poet, whose intense, rough, philosophical verse is far different from the mannered polish of his contemporaries.  “To the Sun” is considered by many to be one of his best: it is simultaneously an ode to the Sun, a celebration of spring, a pagan invocation, a Christian prayer, an experiment in prosody, a prisoner’s lament, a defense of animism.

I don’t know of any translations, so I thought I would offer one.  It’s taken from a longer piece I wrote on Campanella’s life and poetry, for an impending occult journal.  The journal seems to be held up in production; they said it was okay if I posted “To the Sun” as my toast to spring.

A few notes may help.  Campanella was deeply influenced by the philosopher Telesio, whose conviction that all matter is alive, and re-framing of Christian dualism as a struggle between heat and cold, are relevant here.  The school mentioned a couple of times is probably Telesio’s Academy of Cosenza; Janus is invoked in his role as gatekeeper.  Campanella wrote in heroic couplets, an unusual choice for the time; I’ve opted for a more literal rendition, which I hope is not too prosy.  The notes are by the first editor and publisher, Tobias Adami.  To the Sun, then, and to spring!  Click below to get to Campanella.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

TO THE SUN (1)

In Spring, from the desire for heat

   Janus answered me contrariwise. My true prayer
I address to you, Phoebus, you who adorn my school.
I see you in Aries, arisen to glory; and every
Vital substance now imitates your actions.
You cleanse, revive, and call to fresh celebration
All things secret, ailing, dead, and listless.
O wake me with the others, mighty Numen,
You more precious and beloved than all others.
If you, more than all, highest Sun, do I honor,
Why, more than all, do I shiver, frozen in darkness?
Let me quit my cell, while the greening treetops
Reach up from buried roots to your bright light.
The virtue hidden in those trunks, converted
On high to buds, you draw into delicate progeny.
Hidden frozen springs melt into purest
Water, which gushes forth to slake the earth.
Badgers and dormice wake from their long sleep;
To the littlest worms you offer spirit and motion.
Pale serpents at your beams return to life,
And I, in misery, envy all of their kind.
Dying in Ireland these past five months, freezing,
Birds can now soar up to high flight.
And all these workings of your sacred vigor
Are denied to me, your most ardent lover.
Today, we believe, Christ too arose from the dead,
While my unyielding tomb holds me alive.
Dry olive trees receive such blessings from you
That they often bring forth green branches.
I am alive, not dead; I am green, not dry;
Although entombed like a cadaver for you.
Men wrote about you, denying you sense and life,
Arguing that common flies were your superior. (2)
I called them heretical, traitors and ingrates to you;
For this they buried me, I your defender.
Enemies and flies can delight in you:
It is better for your followers to be a fly or an enemy.
None will know your worth should I stay silenced,
For these great titles of yours will be buried with me.
You are the living temple, the portrait, the venerable face, (3)
The pomp, and the supreme visage of the one true God,
Father of nature and blessed king of the stars,
Life, soul, and sense of every secondary thing,
Under whose auspices you founded an admirable school,
Which philosophizes on the Primary Wisdom.
The angelic spirits live joyfully in you,
To such great vital force they owe their dwelling.
I seek by all these qualities that shining light (4)
Which never dims when it appears.
If Fate opposes, call the Primary Wisdom,
For he can refuse no boon to you, his likeness.
Angelic spirits, summon Christ the Prince,
Heir of the Earth, and give his light to me.
Omnipotent God, I accuse the ministers of impiety,
For they deny me Thy blessed gifts.
O miserere, God, Thou broadest fount
Of all light, may THY LIGHT come.

(1) The Sun is the symbol of this author’s academy.  All of the Sun’s effects in spring.

(2) Many say that the fly is nobler than the Sun because it has a soul.  And the author says that the Sun is all sense and life, and gives life to lower beings.

(3) Titles the author has given to the Sun.

(4) All he wants is to see the light of the Sun; which, being in a cell, he could never see.  And he tells the Sun that if it cannot do this, to call upon God, the Primary Wisdom; and thus he turns from the Sun to God, and prays that He give him His light, and that He overturn the false justice of earth.