Taking Liberties: Orlando Furioso Dissacrato

An archival set, part two

Aug 14, 2024

[Here is the second Orlando article from the misty past. By this point, my surgery should be several days behind me, deo volente without complications. As I cannot see the future, however, I cannot yet give any reports on the matter here. Still, prayers, et cetera are as welcome as ever.]

During the high Middle Ages, poems written on the “Matter of France”—that is, tales of the paladins of Charlemagne, and of Count Roland (or Orlando) in particular—were among Europe’s most beloved and most purely fanciful literary entertainments; only stories of the Arthurian court (the “Matter of Britain”) rivaled them in popularity, variety, or extravagance of invention. One would scarcely guess this if one knew only of the Chanson de Roland, the late eleventh century poem from which the whole Carolingian cycle sprang; unlike the earliest Arthurian fables, it was a fairly plain affair, whose atmosphere of austere martial realism was alleviated in only a few places by an incredible detail or two. But, once the Carolingian theme had been stated, the variations that followed from it—in successive chansons de geste and cantares de gesta and Heldengedichte and “epick histories”—departed ever further from the original story’s stern simplicity, and came to incorporate ever more fabulous elements: impossible feats, mythical beasts, magical objects, superhuman foes, and so forth. In the end, the whole tradition culminated in that sudden effusion of glorious literary lunacy that produced the three great Orlando “romances” of the Italian Renaissance—Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (1478-1483), Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (finished 1486, published 1494), and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516-1532)—which are, without question, among the wildest and most profligate fictions in European literature. They are “epics,” perhaps, but are every bit as defiant of the classical unities (not only of time and place, but of tone and texture) as the dramas of England and Spain’s Golden Age theatres; and they are even more heterogeneous (well, once one excludes Cymbeline from the comparison). Their stories spill across the entire known world, to say nothing of Hell, the realm of fairy, and the moon; they recount sieges, military engagements, and single combat, but also tell of giants, sprites, sorcerers, sea monsters, ogres, magic gardens, and hidden kingdoms; and they lurch convulsively—though somehow quite nimbly—from the hilarious to the sardonic to the violent to the tragic to the mystical. And, once upon a time, they were widely, even avidly read, and their influence pervaded all the literatures of the continent. Certainly, it would be hard to exaggerate their importance for later Italian and French writers (Rabelais is unimaginable without Pulci, for instance); and they may have left their most indelible mark on English letters, from Spenser to Byron and beyond.

Now, though, they gather dust in those shadowy galleries where the Western canon’s most rarely visited monuments are kept. This is a terrible pity. Modern readers may not have much patience for long verse narratives, but these are anything but forbidding works; they are thoroughly delightful and can be enjoyed by anyone with an imagination and a sense of humor. And yet Pulci and Boiardo, in particular, are scarcely remembered today outside Italy, while Ariosto lingers on in the consciousness of educated persons generally only as an “important” name. There is at least, I suppose, some small justice in this: Ariosto is unquestionably the greatest of the three—the best poet, the most imaginative fantasist, the wittiest humorist, the gravest tragedian—and so, if only one of them is to be allowed any significant posterity, it should be he. And the Furioso is by far the most fully accomplished of the three romances. It retains and improves upon the best aspects of the other two—Morgante’s ribaldry, irreverence, and parody, the Innamorato’s whimsy, brio, eroticism, and fancy—while enlarging the scope of action, enriching the portrayals of individual characters, deepening the pathos of the material, making its levity still more buoyant, and infusing the whole with a greater and more ironic sophistication. Admittedly, exactly what the poem is about is somewhat difficult to pin down; but this hardly matters. The narrative takes up the various stories begun in the Innamorato but left unfinished at the time of Boiardo’s death: the infatuation of Orlando with the beautiful sorceress Angelica, daughter of the King of Cathay, and his pursuit of her across Europe and into the Far East; the siege of Paris by the Moors; the adventures of Ruggiero, mythical founder of the House of Este (of which both Boiardo and Ariosto were clients); the rampages of the evil Moorish King of Sarza, Rodomonte; the wanderings of the English paladin Astolfo; and a number of other plot lines. And the principal pleasure the poem as a whole affords lies in the ingenuity with which Ariosto weaves the disparate tales together in ever more outlandish, intricate, and frenzied complications, and then still at the last manages to resolve them all in a single moment of dramatic finality.

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Which brings me, somewhat reluctantly, to the occasion of these observations: Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation (2010), by David R. Slavitt. Ariosto’s magnum opus has never wanted for translators, however much reading fashions may have changed over the years. English versions have appeared with a certain predictable regularity ever since John Harington’s splendid edition of 1591. In modern English, there are two faithful and eminently readable translations readily available: Guido Waldman’s in prose, and Barbara Reynolds’s in verse. Now David R. Slavitt has entered the lists with a verse rendering of his own, and… well… What exactly can one say of Slavitt’s version? Clearly it is to his credit that he would undertake so enormous a task, and that he wants to make the book available in what he takes to be a particularly engaging form. But, frankly, there is nothing to recommend this book to any reader interested in Ariosto, or even in a good story. Slavitt makes high claims for his achievement in these pages: he believes (or affects to believe) that he—unlike any of his predecessors, with the possible exception of Harington—has genuinely captured Ariosto’s mercurial “playfulness”; he is even sufficiently pleased with his attempts at an English ottava rima that he does not hesitate (very, very unwisely) to invoke Byron; and he thinks that the exorbitant liberties he takes with the text and the constant intrusions of his own voice into the poem somehow capture the spirit of the original better than a more faithful rendition would. On every count, he is tragically mistaken.

To begin with, it must be pointed out—since one would never know from the book’s cover—that Slavitt’s is an abridgement of the Furioso. It is little more than half the length of Ariosto’s text. Nor is it a prudent, judicious, careful abridgement; it is sheer, haphazard, arbitrary butchery. The first half of the epic is more or less intact; but then it is as if Slavitt simply grew fatigued with the whole project and began hacking off great portions at random. The entire story simply collapses in a heap of disjointed fragments, and all of Ariosto’s mad, elegant narrative choreography is entirely lost. The omissions are simply staggering, and inexcusable. Just as the poem is building to its multiple climaxes, for instance, Slavitt cavalierly skips the last eighty stanzas of Canto 30, then all of Cantos 31 to 33, then the first 39 stanzas of Canto 34, and then all of Canto 35… (and so on). Absolutely crucial episodes disappear altogether (I was especially annoyed to see Astolfo’s visit to Hell discarded), and what remains is incoherent. And then—alas, alack—there is Slavitt’s absolutely ghastly poetry. Charles Ross, in his introduction to the volume, says that Slavitt writes in an “elastic version of iambic pentameter,” which is a nice way of saying that his verse does not scan very well. True, it is pentameter for the most part, but in sprung rhythm—now iambic, now dactylic or anapestic or what have you—with lines of anywhere from ten to fifteen syllables. In principle, this is a problem: the special charm of good ottava rima, as Byron shows, is its combination of aphoristic brevity and humorous digression, which only really works when metric discipline is fairly rigid and the rhymes are particularly clever. Still, though, Slavitt’s dilated periods might be bearable if one did not have to read so many lines twice to hear the stresses, and if his stanzas were not so awkwardly put together; but the syntax is often clumsy, the rhymes are rarely inspired, and the effect is almost always jejune. To take a specimen, more or less at random: