Birdsongs and Sonnets: Acoustic Imitation in Renaissance Lyric

Abstract

abstract:Nightingale poetry draws on an ancient literary topos that attributes human meaning to the pure voice of birdsong. Yet a branch of this tradition pulls in the opposite direction, in which the ancient simile between human and bird instead collapses semantics into sound. Largely neglected in existing scholarship, this extraordinary family of poems, musical settings, and ad sonum translation moves among and between the languages of Renaissance Europe, expanding the work of “imitation” and demanding new strategies of reading lyric.