Customer Reviews

Orlando Furioso: A Romantic Epic: Part 1 (Penguin Classics) (Pt. 1)

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I may not have been the only person to have noticed how much the poetry improves in the last half of _Paradiso_ in the Dorothy Sayers translation. This is because Sayers died before completing the last of her translation of the _Divina Commedia_, and her devoted friend and admirer Barbara Reynolds took over. But where Sayers had been technically impressive in matching Dante's terza rima, but pedestrian in the poetry, at the point where (as I guess) Reynolds takes over a new lightness of touch and poetic feel for the language makes itself felt.

This Ariosto translation is Reynolds' great achievement. Moreover it is one of the three or four greatest literary translations in English, an achievement to stand beside Dryden's _Aeniad_ and Fairfax's _Gerusalemma Liberata_. (On Pope's _Illiad_, which I'm currently reading, I tend to agree with the contemporary reviewer who commented, "A very pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer".)

She captures Ariosto's wit and lightness, occasionally turning in closing couplets for her stanzas that are as sharp as Byron's in _Don Juan_ (who was in turn also using Ariosto - among others - as a model), but also following Ariosto in allowing the sense to flow from stanza to stanza in a quite un-Byronic way. As well, she manages to transmit Ariosto's graver passages in equally dignified verse, for example some of the set pieces imitated (by Ariosto) from Homer. English readers tend to think of Ottava Rima as a vehicle for comic verse, but in Italian it is a model for epic. It's just that the great Italian epic tradition, unlike the English epic tradition before Byron's great anti-epic, includes humour.

As for Ariosto, he is a great poet and story-teller, and (not exactly a literary judgment, this) his authorial "voice" is one whose company you cannot help enjoying. His humour, sometimes sly, is also warmly compassionate; sometimes satirical, sometimes splendidly and deliberately silly. Ariosto knows his flying horses, invisibility rings, sexy sorceresses and the rest are perfectly absurd, but manages to maintain the fantasy elements as wonderful and exciting, without ever undercutting them with mere cynicism or bathos. But most often the humour is warm and character-based.

His story has an astonishing range of characters, the Moorish warriors and their lovers depicted as fairly and favourably as his Christian protegonists, and an astonish sweep, all over Europe and the East, with digressions to the Moon and other enchanted places.

Another feature of Ariosto is his feminism, which shows in his warrior women, who give and take in battle every bit as well as the men. He also tellingly mocks some of the anti-feminist aspects of chivalry, as in the scene where one of Ariosto's heroes is called upon to champion in a trial by combat a woman who has been accused of unchastity. The hero readily agrees to defend the woman's honour, but only after observing that he would as readily defend her if she were unchaste, as in his view (clearly also Ariosto's) women have a right to make love without being condemned for it.

Two last observations. First, I believe that this poem, and not Dante's, is the great Italian epic, superior to Dante for the same reason that Shakespeare is superior to Racine, or Byron's English epic is superior to Milton's or even Spencer's. Dante offers moral allegory (though with a thoroughly repellant worldview), and Ariosto's failure to preach has sometimes been taken as a sign of lack of depth or seriousness. But the great epics are about humanity, not allegory (though I have seen attempts to allegorise Homer, none have done so convincingly); and Ariosto presents one of the widest and greatest human canvases of all epic. It is the most readable long poem since the _Odyssey_. Yes.

Second, Amazon has linked this translation to another, a prose translation. I haven't read the prose translation, but I would observe that _Orlando Furioso_ is a poem. To render it as something else is to lose its structure, its purpose and its very nature. To present a prose translation of this poem as a genuine "version of Ariosto" is a bit like presenting Beethoven's Ninth symphony by playing an arrangement for kazoo: some of Beethoven will come through in a kazoo transcription, but you cannot call it the Ninth. Get the Reynolds; it is a great and easy _read_, and it is one of the glories of English poetic translation.

Cheers!

Laon

This renaissance romance combines elements of the adventure story along the lines of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy with satire in the tradition of Lucien, Ben Jonson, and Jonathan Swift. Barbara Reynolds' verse translation is well paced, easy to read, and displays a rich use of language. Be aware, though, that this is a two volume translation and the catalog, as of 1-9-97, shows only the first volume is available from Amazon. The prose translation from Oxford University Press is complete in one volume, but is not as easy to read in that it suffers from very small print and a language that is not as vigorous as that of the Reynold's translation. J. D. Wilson, Jr.

Ariosto was one of the giants of Renaissance literature, and this was his footprint. Grand, touching, funny, witty, stirring -- as Dryden said of Chaucer, here is the world's plenty. Some of the greatest poets of the next two centuries (Tasso, Spenser, Milton) explicitly attempted to overdo him, and only sometimes succeeded; Byron took as much from Ariosto as he did from Pulci.

But don't read this on that account. Read it because it's a delight from start to finish. War, love, and chivalry are the poet's themes, and they're here in all their forms.

I don't know Italian, but everyone I've asked who would know assures me Reynolds's translation captures not just the essence but the spirit of the original.

(Ignore the reviews that claim that this is a prose translation -- they are from another translation.)

This is a wonderful flight of fantasy that is full of magic castles, horses that fly (hippogriffs), and such imagination and humor that you never cease to be entertained by it all. You may wonder like I did that: If this is "Part One", where is part two? I was unable to find any such continuation. You have to just enjoy this marvelous tale for what it is.

I would have loved to have had the two volumes of this wonderful work on my Kindle, but ten minutes after downloading them I returned them for credit. They have no Table of Contents and almost no navigation marks for the five-way controller (or whatever the equivalent is on the keyless models), so forget about browsing. Even more disappointing is that the entire poem (not just the quotes in the introduction, which is all you get to see in the sample) has been set with a wide left margin, a huge waste of space that also causes lines to wrap unnecessarily. And when they wrap, they wrap to the same margin, which is just ugly.

Formatting narrative verse for the Kindle is really not difficult: you just create a paragraph style flush-left with a hanging indent. How can Penguin, a large publishing company with many Kindle editions, not know or care?

For that matter, it would make sense to combine the two books into a single e-book, for ease of searching on (for example) the names of the many characters. There's no reason not to do this on a device that never gets fatter. But here, as in so many cases, we get the impression that the Kindle edition is just a careless afterthought.

My rating is for the Kindle edition only. Unlike David Slavitt, who treats the poem as little more than a silly romp, Reynolds does full justice to its rich textures, not only in her learned yet very readable translation but in her prefaces and notes. The useful apparatus in the printed volumes includes running heads that summarize the action, detailed indexes that give a quick reminder of what the many characters have been up to, and even schematics of some of the battles and jousts. In paperback, this is a five-star production in every way.

I read this book over the course of a summer, and delighted in taking Reynold's translation canto by canto. Ariosto's style is immortalized in her translation, complete with his witty asides and satirical commentary. Amazing.

Not a review here but a note. Readers who enjoy Orlando would appreciate Anthony Powell's witty account of the moon trip in the 12th and last volume of his A Dance to the Music of Time.