'With a wild surmise' : on translating Lorenzo de' Medici's Ambra two hundred years after William Roscoe

Abstract

Lorenzo de' Medici's Ambra is a poem in ottava rima, forty-eight stanzas in all, with an inner cohesion but some contradictions and illogicalities because most probably it was unrevised and unfinished. As with all Lorenzo's longer poems, with the notable exception of the Rappresentazione, it is virtually impossible to date. The scant evidence suggests a time between 1474 and 1486, a long stretch in a remarkably short life. Even the title is problematical. In the manuscript tradition some codices bear the title Descriptio Hiemis, which is strictly applicable only to the opening twenty-two octaves of the poem, nine of which are a powerful description of a flood, while the remaining octaves tell a fabula, the metamorphosis of the beautiful nymph, Ambra, into a rock. She arouses the lust of the river god, Ombrone, who pursues her and who calls to his aid the father river, Amo. She prays to Diana to preserve her chastity as a result of which she is turned into a rock and the lament of Ombrone who has killed the thing he loved, ends the poem. The Ambra of the title, for Lorenzo, was certainly his residence at Poggio a Caiano, which he designed with Giuliano da Sangallo, near which flows the Ombrone and the poem's physical setting is the surrounding countryside.