Against the Donning of the Gown: Contro Il Portar La Toga

  • Galileo Galilei &
  • Giovanni F. Bignami
Moon Books: 2000. 85 pp.
Galileo the poet: he wrote that people could better appreciate one another's virtues if everyone were to go naked. Credit: BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Rightly hailed as the father of modern physics and a mighty expositor of Italian prose, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) also dabbled in poetry. Like other cultured gentlemen of his acquaintance, Galileo composed verses in terza rima, the 11-syllable-line style of Dante's The Divine Comedy, and wrote sonnets, too. But although all of Galileo's published books on natural philosophy appeared in English translations before the end of the seventeenth century, his poetry has remained an obscure Italian curiosity.

Now, at last, Giovanni Bignami, director of science at the Italian Space Agency, has translated two of Galileo's best poems into English. The result is a book as distinguished for its physical beauty as for the quality of its text (see http://www.galileounaluna.com). It looks to be an artefact of Galileo's own time, printed in a limited edition of only 2,000 copies, on “natural cotton fiber paper with neutral pH for conservation beyond time and with uncut edges”, according to a typographer's note at the back. It is bound by hand in thick leather covers the colour of vanilla ice-cream, with a facsimile of Galileo's signature impressed on the face, not to mention a woven bookmark sewn into the binding. Even the imprimatur on the title page — the coat of arms of the Lyncean Academy — pulls a thread through history, for in 1611 Galileo joined this early scientific society, which published two of his astronomy books, and today it counts Bignami among its members.

“This is not to be taken seriously,” Bignami states in his opening “Caveat” to the poetry. Indeed, Galileo might well have said the same. The first poem, probably written in 1590, presents the youthful Galileo at his most playful, before his father's death in 1591 left him financially responsible for the support of his extended family on an upstart professor's paltry salary, and before the Church Edict of 1616 constrained his broad view of the Universe. This title poem, Against the Donning of the Gown, pokes 301 lines of fun at the pompous practice of the University of Pisa, where Galileo began teaching in 1589, of forcing professors to wear academic gowns whenever they appeared in public. Galileo paid frequent fines for breaking this rule. In the poem he claims that people could better appreciate one another's true virtues if everyone were to go naked, and that a man's dress tells no more about his true capabilities than a fancy flask discloses of the wine inside it. Despite the light tone and topic, the poem epitomizes Galileo's gusto for a good argument.

Bignami has managed to retain the braided rhyme scheme of terza rima (ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on) in his translation. This is a remarkable feat, considering how Italian — a musical language of only seven vowel sounds that rhyme almost effortlessly (even accidentally in ordinary speech) — compares with English, which has 52 vowel sounds. The rhyming does not make the poem feel any more stretched or far-fetched in English than it sounds in Italian, however. Its original mix of highfalutin declamatory airs and low humour is well preserved.

Although Against the Donning of the Gown says nothing about science per se, the second poem in this volume addresses a true scientific conundrum that eluded Galileo all his life and fuelled some of his nastiest contests with Jesuit contemporaries. This sonnet, “Enigma”, poses a riddle to the reader: “Monster I am,” the verse begins, “stranger in shape and form/Th[a]n the harpy, the siren or the ghoul”.

What is this wretched, wraith-like creature who dwells in the dark, pursued by swarms of hunters? Galileo never published the puzzle's answer, but Bignami shows his own (no doubt correct) solution in an image of a comet drawn by Donata Almici.

Seventeenth-century philosophers passionately debated the nature of comets in that heady era of early telescopic observations. Although illness prevented Galileo from viewing the comets that appeared soon after he had perfected the telescope, he denounced all comets as optical illusions conjured up in the Earth's atmosphere. “I watch my limbs disjoin and lose the fight,” the closing lines of “Enigma” lament, “As life and name and soul give up I must.”