Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation by Ludovico Ariosto (PDF)

Description

The appearance of David R. Slavitt’s translation of Orlando Furioso (“Mad Orlando”), one of the great literary achievements of the Italian Renaissance, is a publishing event. With this lively new verse translation, Slavitt introduces readers to Ariosto’s now neglected masterpiece – a poem whose impact on Western literature can scarcely be exaggerated. Slavitt’s translation captures the energy, comedy, and great fun of Ariosto’s Italian.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The first thing to say is that this is a triumphantly bold, original, lively and (above all) consistently READABLE version of one of the great neglected masterpieces of European literature. It’s a page-turner; it’s nearly always entertaining; and at times it made this reviewer laugh out loud in a public place (the sure test of a comic masterpiece).The only translations I had encountered hitherto were Guido Waldman’s highly accurate prose crib, and Sir John Harington’s (handsomely re-issued in 1972 by Oxford University Press, who in those days still used to bind books properly). Slavitt praises the latter, but complains, not unreasonably, that it’s just too `Elizabethan’. This is his way of pointing out that no modern general reader is likely to be switched on by it.No fewer than four of Handel’s operas are based on Orlando Furioso; all 17th and 18th century European writers (and most from the 19th century as well) regarded it as required reading; and the world’s art galleries are stuffed with countless paintings illustrating its episodes and characters. Only in the 20th century did its star begin to somewhat fade from view.We therefore owe Slavitt a huge debt of gratitude for his prodigious labours. I would love to quote examples of his successes: they abound on almost every page. It needs to be spoken in a sort of Woody Allen voice, not just so that the rhymes work, but also to get the full flavour of his well-developed deadpan sense of humour.However I want to sound the same note of warning that has already been sounded by several of your other reviewers, albeit without the same harrumph of disgust or disappointment. Metrically, his version IS tone-deaf–deliberately so, sans doute. He calls his metre an `elastic’ version of iambic pentameter. Hmm. Yeah, well, it’s VERY elastic. Instead of ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum, we get something much closer to real conversation: the flow of talk from a top-class wisecracking stand-up comedian. It works. But this is a real loss nonetheless, and I can best illustrate it in the following way.Here is Ariosto’s own 1532 version of one and a bit stanzas from his Canto Ottavo: 44 “. . . Così dicea la donna con gran pianto, / quando le apparve l’eremita accanto. // 45 Avea mirato da l’estrema cima / d’un rilevato sasso l’eremita / Angelica, che giunta alla parte ima / è dello scoglio, afflitta e sbigottita. / Era sei giorni egli venuto prima; / ch’un demonio il portò per via non trita: / e venne a lei fingendo divozione / quanta avesse mai Paulo o Ilarione.”And here’s Sir John Harington’s really rather wonderful version of the same lines (1591): 38 “. . . These wofull words utterd the Ladie bright, / When straight the hermit came within her sight // 39 Who all the while had in a corner stood / And heard her make this piteous plaint and mone / Proceeding from her sad and mourning moode, / Enough to move a hart as hard as stone. / It did the senex fornicator good / To thinke that he was there with her alone, / Yet so devoutly commeth this old carrion / As though it had been Paule or Saint Hillarion.”(Isn’t the Latin phrase `senex fornicator’ marvellous? You don’t even need to know any Latin to find it funny.)Finally, what does David Slavitt (2009) make of it? 44 “. . . Thus she called / into the empty night when the hermit made / his entrance, or let us say his ambuscade. / 45 From a high rock, he had been looking down / having arrived here just six days before / Angelica, whom he watched very nearly drown, / and then in desperation reach the shore. / Now he can seem to come to her aid with her frown / of concern and piety, such that she’d take him for / another Paul or Hilarion. / (Those two / were early hermits, or should I assume that you knew?)”Interestingly, the first and fourth lines of his stanza 45 are genuine iambic pentameters (a rare treat in Slavitt)–and it isn’t without humour; incorporating into the last line of his text what is a much-needed note in these dumbed down times works rather well, I think; but he’s had to sacrifice those exquisitely humorous rhymes in both Ariosto and Harington: `divozione’ / `Hilarione’ on the one hand, and `carrion’ / `Hilarion’ on the other (in this instance, Harington is arguably even more successful than the original). And above all, the music is missing. Metrical verse, well-handled, provides a sense of smoothness and harmony that is, of course entirely alien to our jangled and discordant age (except perhaps in the work of poets like Larkin and Wilbur).Does this matter? Well, yes, to an extent, it does.However, it may well be that this is a necessary price to pay. We grin and bear it (and I must emphasize again that we do genuinely grin, and that not infrequently)—since we’re unlikely to encounter another translation in our lifetime, and this one is probably as good as it gets. The iambic pentameter has certainly had a bad press from the Modernists: “stale, pale, skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop, gloop!)”—Kenneth Koch. The weight of metrical tradition was sometimes (though by no means always) too heavy a burden for them to bear. The earlier generation did grow up with the Victorians, for heaven’s sake. And Slavitt’s much looser handling of the poetic language has the authority of, for instance, Koch’s exuberant reworking of the older forms in Ko: a Season on Earth and The Duplications (this New York poet greatly admired both Ariosto and Byron, but, as the above quotation shows, was far from fond of the iambic pentameter). Charles Ross in his Introduction refers to Slavitt’s `bemused Byronic voice’, but this is genuinely misleading. Byron’s was a consummate metrical technician, and his instantly recognizable ottava rima has an aristocratic poise that is the absolute reverse of Slavitt’s much more gutsy and demotic vernacular. (If only the author of Don Juan had lived into old age: he might have spent his twilight years polishing an incomparable and definitive Ariosto translation of his own.)All in all, however, this remains a book that should be on the shelves of any reasonably literate American or British adult. Whether you read it from cover to cover (as I just have) or just dip into it (like a cookie jar) from time to time, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a truly great achievement.

⭐As the other reviews suggest, David Slavitt’s unorthodox and anachronistic translation of Ariosto has its detractors and admirers. I am in the latter camp for one reason above all. His way of pacing the complex plot and adding reminders of who is who and what is what make this epic approachable and fun. Over the years I have tried to get through the Reynolds translation a few times. I always bog down in its starchy inverted syntax. Within a day of picking up the Slavitt, I was deep into this epic, laughing frequently, tsking at the dad-joke rhymes just as frequently, and enjoying the whole experience enormously. It ain’t Byron. But it is a hoot — a brilliant entertainment that clearly loves but does not idolize its source text.Reynolds’ Penguin edition has many fans — and if you’re not a ham-brained vulgarian like me, you’ll probably like that one more. For sure the intro, notes, and appendices and such are far better in the Penguin, and it comes closer to the phrase-by-phrase sense of Ariosto. But if you are a ham-brained vulgarian looking to get through about half of this wonderful story for the first time — this one’s for you. Besides, if you are looking for an accurate sense of what the original text actually says — just take the plunge and try the Italian. Or supplement the Italian with Waldman or Reynolds (or Rose). Another thing to say for Slavitt — he communicates the fun of translating Ariosto so effectively that I found myself looking up the original and planning to learn to read Italian properly just to appreciate what he’s appreciating. “I’ll have what he’s having.”So what’s the downside? Like others, I think Harvard UP has done this text a huge disservice. Slavitt completed a full translation of the text, but Harvard decided to publish about half of it and toss the rest. What we have here is the first 23 books (the equivalent of Vol. 1 of the Penguin edition) virtually intact, and a meager sampling of the second half jammed on at the end. This seems very stupid. Those who are reading Ariosto in the 21st century are not in general going to be dissuaded by its full length, nor will they be happy to see an immersive story abandoned at the home stretch. Just do two volumes. Or make the full translation available as an ebook. Obviously, the reason Harvard went this direction has to do with production costs and probably copyright law as well. But it feels like a bait and switch and leaves a very bad taste. The ex post facto justification Slavitt offers in the intro — saying, basically, this is enough to assuage most appetites — feels condescending.A small publisher, Outpost19, did offer the rest of the Slavitt translation for a reasonable price a few years ago. (See Slavitt’s “Lacunae.”) That edition is now out-of-print and grotesquely overpriced. Another publisher would be wise to step in and make the rest of the Slavitt version more widely available. Or maybe Harvard could offer a luxury deluxe double edition when they reprint this. I would imagine that most of the lunatics who are into this edition would like twice as much of it twice as much — and would loosen their purse-strings accordingly.

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