From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Mirabili dicti, or Dragon's Teeth
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 21:01:43 GMT

                                    Sunday, the 13th of December, 1992

Larry Hammer writes:
  Er, no, I dug an old book out of the Univerisity library shortly after
  finishing ORLANDO FURIOSO (in Barbara Reynold's wonderful Penguin
  Classics translation).  The INNAMORATO wasn't a wonderful, or
  particularly readable thing.  I suspected the translation, but the story
  was obviously not as good as Ariosto's anyway.

By all accounts, the story is better in the sense of being more
inventive and rapidly paced than Ariosto. Ariosto's apparently
``weighs'' more, though, for his sense of irony and political
satire.  Boiardo is all sheer delight in the story for story's sake.
I am agreed that Barbara Reynolds' Ariosto is wonderful. Here
are a couple of relevant passages from C.S. Lewis' _The Allegory
of Love_:

       Before I proceed to make good this claim I must say
       a word of Spenser's immediate model---the Italian
       epic. This vast body of poetry has in our time fallen
       strangely out of favour. But its products were familiar
       masterpieces to readers as diverse as Spenser, Milton,
       Dryden, Hurd, Macaulay, and Scott, and young ladies in
       the eighteenth century would have been ashamed to
       neglect what is now not infrequently neglected by scholars.
       Our oblivion of these poets is much to be regretted, not
       only because it vitiates our understanding of the Romantic
       Movement---a phenomenon which becomes baffling indeed if we
       choose to neglect the noble viaduct on which the love
       of chivalry and `fine fabling' travelled straight across
       from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century---but also
       because it robs us of a whole species of pleasures and
       narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man
       left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For, like
       these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies
       of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced
       by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and
       brilliant production. It is one of the *successes*, the
       undisputed achievements. [p. 298]

Now, a long paragraph each on Boiardo and Ariosto:
       Boiardo, who began his _Innamorato_ about 1472, is in
       many ways very close to popular poetry. His cantos often
       begin with complimentary addresses to the audience who
       have gathered round to listen to him, and usually end
       with a reminder that there is another instalment to follow.
       His poem is like an endless serial---like the cycle of _Pip, Squeak,
       and Wilfred_. At the first glance it would seem as aimless,
       but this is not the case. His method is that of interlocked
       story. The formula is to take any number of chivalrous
       romances and arrange such a series of coincidences that they
       interrupt one another every few pages. The English reader
       will be apt to think of Malory or Spenser. But Malory so often
       leaves his separate stories unfinished or else, if he finishes them,
       fails to interlock them at all (so that they drop away from
       the rest of the book as independent organisms) and is so generally
       confused that he is not a good parallel. Boiardo keeps his head:
       We have no doubt that if he had finished the poem all the threads
       would have been neatly tied up. Spenser, on the other hand,
       has so few stories compared with the Italian (a prose abstract
       of _The Faerie Queene_ would be a mere trifle compared with one
       of the _Innamorato_) and is so leisurely, that he can give no
       idea of Boiardo's _scherzo_. Boiardo would have told the story
       of Spenser's first canto in a few stanzas---the story of the
       whole _Faerie Queene_ in a few cantos. The speed, the pell-mell
       of the episodes, the crazy carnival jollity of Boiardo are
       his very essence. He invents a world in which, though love and war
       are almost the sole occupations, yet a major character hardly
       ever has time to lose a life or a maidenhead, for always, at
       the critical moment, a strange knight, a swift ship, a bandersnatch
       or a boojum, breaks in, and we are caught up in another story.
       It is extremely enjoyable, but in a breathless way; it is rather
       like a ride on a switchback. But as soon as I have said this I
       must correct that impression---so paradoxical is this _genre_---
       by warning the reader that a true chivalric valiancy mixes
       with the hurly-burly, that serious love poetry and even love
       allegory may crop up at any moment. Near the end of the poem,
       when Brandimante and Roger meet, the poet surprises us by his power
       of delineating passion. Reynold's meeting with Love in the
       forest is a scene more `romantic' (in the English sense of the
       word) and more tender than anything in Ariosto. The reflective
       passages at the beginnings of his cantos are full of lyrical
       beauty. The knight, the lover, the poet, exist in him side by side
       with the manipulator of a sort of Punch and Judy show. He is
       very like a boy---the best sort of boy. It is a little remarkable
       that a poem of this length and a predominantly comic poem in the
       Latin tradition should be so chaste.
            Ariosto is admittedly the greatest of Italian poets
       after Dante; but his superiority to Boiardo is not, perhaps,
       immediately obvious to an Englishman. This is partly because
       this superiority is, in the first place, one of style which
       cannot be fully discerned except by an Italian; and partly
       because he is more typically Latin than his predecessor---
       a harder and more brilliant intelligence. He has received
       his whole method, and much of his material, ready made from
       Boiardo. He is much more like Boiardo than is commonly supposed.
       But the differences are important. In the first place, he is far
       ahead of the older poet as a delineator of character. His people
       are not, indeed, what the countrymen of Shakespeare would call
       `characters': they are drawn from the outside and drawn by one
       who is more interested in the general nature of `the passions'
       (it is the Latin way) than in idiosyncrasies. But they live.
       Bradamant, with her undisguised southern jealousies and despairs,
       and her strange mixture of arrogance and humility, is certainly
       one of the great heroines. Closely connected with this delineation
       of character is Ariosto's command of pathos---again, not such
       a pathos as Englishmen like best, but very good in its way. Roland's
       lament over Brandimart may sound to our ears but thin and rhetorical
       compared with Ector's lament over Launcelot---but this is our
       insular disability. In the third place, Ariosto's humour, at its
       best, is very unlike Boiardo's. Boiardo's indeed had hardly been
       humour, hardly more than fun, whereas Ariosto is a master of irony
       and of comic construction. But we must not insist too much on these
       differences. The power in which Ariosto excels all poets that I have
       read is one which he shares with Boiardo---invention. The fertility
       of his fancy is `beyond expectation, beyond hope'. His actors range
       from archangels to horses, his scene from Cathay to the Hebrides. In
       every stanza there is something new: battles in all their detail,
       strange lands with their laws, customs, history and geography,
       storm and sunshine, mountains, islands, rivers, monsters, anecdotes,
       conversations---there seems no end to it. He tells us what his people
       ate; he describes the architecture of their palaces. It is `God's
       plenty': you can no more exhaust it than you can exhaust nature itself.
       When you are tired of Ariosto, you must be tired of the world. If
       ever you come near to feeling that you can read no more adventures,
       at that very moment he begins another with something so ludicrous,
       so piquant, or so questionable, in its exordium, that you decide
       to read at least this one more. And then you are lost: you must
       go on till bedtime, and next morning you must begin again. The
       art by which this interest is kept up almost conceals itself. Part
       of the secret, no doubt, is Ariosto's practice of alternating
       stretches which are as headlong as Boiardo with resting-places
       where he luxuriates in description; and part is the excellence
       of his transitions. The _Furioso_, in its own peculiar way, is
       as great a masterpiece of construction as the _Oedipus Rex_. But 
       nothing will finally explain, as no criticism of mine can
       adequately represent, the overwhelming achievement of Ariosto.
       There is only one English critic who could do justice to this
       gallant, satiric, chivalrous, farcical, flamboyant poem: Mr.
       Chesterton should write a book on the Italian epic. [pp. 300-303]

Finally, an overall judgment:
       Johnson once described the ideal happiness which he would
       choose if he were regardless of futurity. My own choice,
       with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian
       epic---to be always convalescent from some small illness
       and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there
       to read these poems eight hours of each happy day. [p. 304]

Andy Tucker has informed me by email that Charles Ross' translation
of Boiardo is published by the University of California Press (1989,
900 pages).  I have some xeroxed pages of a fairly polished draft of about
half of it, which I got from Ross 11-12 years ago. The opening stanzas of
the _Innamorato_ go:
   Signori e cavallier che ve adunati
   Per odir cose dilettose e nove,
   Stati attenti e quieti, ed ascoltati
   La bella istoria che 'l mio canto muove;
   E vedereti i gesti smisurati,
   L'alta fatica e le mirabil prove
   Che fece il franco Orlando per amore
   Nel tempo del re Carlo imperatore.

   Non vi par gia, signor, meraviglioso
   Odir cantar de Orlando inamorato,
   Che qualunque nel mondo e piu orgoglioso,
   E da Amor vinto, al tutto subiugato;
   Ne forte braccio, ne ardire animoso,
   Ne scudo o maglia, ne brando affilato,
   Ne altra possanza puo mai far diffesa,
   Che al fin non sia da Amor, battuta e presa.

Ross makes it:
   Lords and knights assembled round
   To hear delightful things and new,
   Be quiet, attentive, listen to
   The worthy story I will tell
   And you will see the wondrous deeds,
   The labors and amazing feats
   Orlando once performed for love,
   When Charlemagne reigned in days of old.

   May you, my lords, not think it strange
   To hear Orlando is in love,
   For always it's the proudest man
   Whom Love defeats and subjugates;
   Neither strong arm nor valiant will,
   Nor shield or mail, nor sharpened sword,
   Nor other power can defend,
   For in the end Love conquers all.

By stanza 5 we've laid bare the villain Gradasso's dark covetousness for
the magical horse Baiardo, and Orlando's sword Durindana, and by
stanza 10, we've left behind the infidel forces hoisting sail in
Cathay, to watch a tournament that Charlemagne has called in Paris.
It's pretty delightful stuff, I think.

              Mike Morris
       (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
           
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