Francesco Petrarch first laid eyes on Laura, the married woman with whom he fell hopelessly in love, exactly 679 years ago tomorrow. He was only 23 and could hardly have suspected that the encounter, and the date itself, would dictate the shape of his life for the next 50 years. He later recorded the momentous event on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil, noting that the lady “first appeared to my eyes about the time of my early manhood in the year of the Lord 1327 on the sixth day of the month of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon in the morning.” With his zeal for symmetry – numerical as well as verbal – Petrarch went on to note that “in the same month of April, on the same sixth day, at the same first hour, in the year 1348, her light was withdrawn from this light.” Laura, who had married Hugues de Sade in 1325, probably remained blissfully unaware of the panting Petrarch (though it is eerie to realize that through her husband she became a distant ancestor of the gruesome Marquis de Sade). He, by contrast, made a career out of his passion.

There’s something distinctly ominous about the date of April 6 in Petrarch’s life. For it wasn’t only the day on which he first spotted Laura or the day on which she died, probably a victim of plague, but also the day on which Petrarch began work on his Latin epic “Africa” and the day on which he was crowned with laurel – one of Laura’s manifestations – in Rome in 1341. Add to this the contemporary belief that Adam had been created on April 6 and that it was also the date of Christ’s crucifixion, and you have a numerological elixir potent enough to fire up the most plodding versifier. And Petrarch was anything but plodding.

I take these details from a wonderful new anthology, “Petrarch in English,” edited by Thomas Roche, (Penguin Classics, 352 pages, $26.25), the latest volume in an excellent series that already includes Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Dante, Baudelaire, and others in their various English guises over the centuries. Mr. Roche’s selection is especially interesting because he has sought out unusual and little-known versions; and he has also, with a certain impishness, included examples of anti-Petrarchan poetry. Such is Petrarch’s immense influence that even his parodists come under his sway.

Of course, there’s something a bit comical as well as poignant in the situation on which this poet feeds. To fan such ardor for half a century on behalf of a lady who remains unaware of your existence may be impossibly noble, but because it’s so one-sided, it risks appearing faintly ridiculous. And you can’t help wondering what Laura herself thought of this shadowy admirer sighing furtively beneath her windows. More pointedly, what did husband Hugues make of it all?

One of the pleasures of Mr. Roche’s selection is that he has unearthed an impressive number of translations by women, most of them quite obscure. He has done this not out of some specious need for “gender balance,” but because their versions are superb. I’d never heard of Anna Hume,who flourished around 1644 (her dates, in contrast to Petrarch’s, remain fuzzy), but her translation of “The Triumph of Love” is masterful, as this excerpt shows:

I live without a soul: I know the way
To cheat my selfe a thousand times a day:
I know to follow whiles I flee my fire:
I freeze when present; absent, my desire
Is hot: I know what cruel rigor Love
Practiceth on the mind, and doth remove
All reason thence, and how he racks the heart.

This strikes the just Petrarchan note. There is contrivance in the play of antitheses and yet they convince. Anna Hume knew her poet but she also knew about hot desire, and it burns through. Even Elizabeth I, the “virgin queen,” tried her hand at translating Petrarch, and it gave her a voice she might not have had purely as sovereign, for the Petrarchan mode employs disguise to allow strong feeling to pour forth, as when she exclaims “how erst the fickle world abused me.”

Among the most impressive of these early translators is the grandly named Barbarina Ogle Brand, Lady Dacre (1768-1854), celebrated in her time as a poet and playwright. In reading her version of “The Triumph of Death,” it struck me that perhaps she, and her sisters, found Petrarch so congenial to translate just because he provided the camouflage of decorum for passionate utterance:

Pale, was she? No, but white as shrouding snows,
That, when the winds are lulled, fall silently,
She seemed as one o’er wearied in repose.
E’en as in balmy slumbers lapt to lie
(The spirit parted from the form below),
In her appeared what the unwise term to die:
And Death sat beauteous on her beauteous brow.

At first glance this seems too lush, but it would be a mistake to balk at such phrases as “balmy slumbers.” It is the cadence of the lines that seduces; the rhythm betrays a sensuousness the subject seems to preclude.

Petrarch the poet is hardly in fashion nowadays,though there are echoes,surprisingly enough, throughout Samuel Beckett (who studied him intensively) and in the recent work of the great contemporary English poet Geoffrey Hill. In a way, though, Petrarch’s neglect is a consequence of his astonishing success. As this anthology shows, no poet, with the possible exceptions of Virgil and Ovid, managed to dominate European literary convention so stubbornly for so long. Not only Spenser and Sydney, Wyatt and Shakespeare, but dozens of poets writing in French and Spanish, German and Italian and Polish, came under his spell. For in composing his “Song Book” (“Canzoniere”), a leap year of 366 sonnets and canzoni on which he labored for decades, Petrarch created and refined a lexicon of tropes and metaphors – almost a kind of meta-language – that later poets found irresistible. In his world, everything – from the beloved’s hair to the stony landscapes in which he voices his laments – is at one and the same time itself and many other things as well. Laura herself is now a woman, now a laurel tree (and the poet’s laurel crown), and now the very breeze (“l’aura” in Italian), and he plays on this profusion of identity with amazing dexterity.

Petrarch’s ingenious conceits work because they are animated by fierce emotion; all the rhetorical devices he can muster are hardly adequate to control the intensity of feeling that animates them. His subtle use of artifice, which strikes us too often as insincere, is really the best strategy he knows for articulating that passion; it is, in his hands, an artifice of authenticity.

eormsby@nysun.com