Do you like my friend's unjealousy poem?

Aye, and your translation of it! This is of course Petrarca's Canzoniere 182, a poem I had more than passing familiarity with since its theme has colored more than one of my own poems. However, I had to find my "Canzoniere" before I could fully understand the nature of your accomplishment in translation. It is, as I would have expected, exquisite, on a par with your translation of Canzoniere 15 some time ago. The poem itself advances through a series of imagistically rich antinomies, with the opposition written in the first two lines: love is at once passion, fire, but also ice (not to sound too much like Frost here). The poem presents a vivid, and accurate, portrayal of love in its many forms, as something at once capable of fanning intense emotion to white-hot intensity, but also of eliciting fear, perhaps of its loss but also the certainty that it may not be in full the grand and perfect thing born of imagining, but something that in the cool light of subsequent analysis is less sublime. It is a riddle, like most things that vex a mortal body! To live without reason is intolerable, in fact impossible, but to straitjacket one's passions in reason is to risk fear, and disenchantment in the most literal sense. That is what makes the first half of this sestet so wonderful! "Sweet sufferings," an oxymoron that in a real sense is not one at all, is devastatingly beautiful; it strikes to the heart of the human condition. Thought cannot hold "sweet sufferings" because to do so for long is unbearable; verse and rhyme cannot, perhaps for no reason truer than Pasternak's knowing aphorism, "Life always spills over the rim of every cup." This type of passion, at once splendid and doomed, is the apotheosis of man and his ruination. It is a fair fire because the reasonable man knows its risks, and yet he is unable to resist it, like a sentient moth drawn to a flame. "So high who weigh" conveys, through anagnorisis, the inevitable outcome in which all readers can share, beautifully rendered in the closing image of vainly spreading wings. Ah, love... Why would the gods mock us with such a cruel chimera? Perhaps because to partake of it is to be brought a little closer to both the glories of paradise and the base realities, to realize that they are never far apart, or far away...