The Ugly Woman flax: she always holds so much in her mouth, that her palate becomes slimy; in her lip there is always some piece of the threads that she bites. She smells just like leather when it is tanned, or like a dead dog, or like the nest of a vulture: her smell is enough to grease the field (now, think, what a comfort!) and she has escaped from the grave; she always has asthma and a cough and she endears me with it. If she grabs the flask, she drinks all of it like a sponge, she even wants me to kiss her. I reproach her: ‘Come on, go away!’ and yet she acts crazy around me. She cannot hold her soul by the teeth, since she only has one for medication; her eyes give out no light, and are full of tartar. Divine spirit drips down to her chest; her throat is so withered and dry, that sexy uruguayan girls it looks like a woodcock’s beak. There are as many wrinkles in her cheeks, as there are stars in the sky; her withered and empty breasts look like worn out fabric. In her pants there is no hair, her belly can be made into an ps more than mules when she circles around me.)
The act of contemplating the poet with pleasure, summed up in the verb ‘vagheggiare,’ in Delcorno Branca’s words ‘verbo per eccellenza del galateo amoroso’ (196) (verbs by definition of the love/courtly etiquette), is in itself an oxymoron
Delcorno Branca traces precisely the Latin and vernacular antecedents at play in this ballad (191–2), but finds the true model in Poliziano’s negative descriptio mulieris in the ode ‘In Anum.’ The language in the ballad is rich in borrowings from medieval realistic poetry. Continue reading Her nose is always dripping, she smells like grease and lard, she is more twisted than a snail