Where Tasso Reads Like Fantasy

Jerusalem Delivered: An English Prose Version by Torquato Tasso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I definitely liked this more than I expected to.

This English version of the 16th Century Italian epic is in rendered in prose, which I always prefer, and the translator has made it both wonderfully comprehensible (compared to say, The Faerie Queen in the original quaint English) and decently poetic. That makes it simple to enter into the narrative, and I found that really engaging.

Naturally, an account of the First Crusade from the perspective of a Christian author in the 1500s will be partial and prejudiced, inclined toward a double standard and committed to religious bigotry. Yep. It is all that. No avoiding it. In some ways, though, Tasso does a decent job of portraying the Muslim characters, the villains and enemies in the story, as humans just as capable of greatness and honor and sacrifice and love as the heroes. This is at least a little corrective for the inevitable chauvinism.

As far as plot and action, the poem is awesome and strangely modern. It unspools so much like speculative fiction that it's impossible to miss the through-line from epic poetry and romance to epic fantasy, and I found myself reading it much like I would JRR Tolkien or Tad Williams. In addition to castles and palaces, pitched battles and single combat, hidden vales and lonely beaches, fallible heroes and love at first sight, warrior women and soothsayers, it has sorcerers and demons and enchanted forests and magical islands. It's a fun story with a thousand creative touches.

Like Paradise Lost, some of the most exciting and compelling parts involve the spirits of hell who are called for a time to harry the crusaders. Satan, here referred to as Pluto, is described this way in canto 4:

A fearsome majesty in his fierce countenance increases the terror and makes him even more proud: his eyes burn red, and his gaze glowers infected with poison like an ill-omened comet; his huge beard envelops his chin and shaggy and thick comes down over his hairy chest, and like deep-yawning maelstrom his mouth stands open, filthy with black blood.

And here is the scene when he calls the spirits of hell:

The piercing sound of the Tartarean trumpet calls up the inhabitants of the eternal shades. The black capacious caverns tremble and the blind air echoes to that reverberation; nor ever so strident plummets the lightning from heaven's supernal regions nor ever so stricken trembles the earth when she locks up vapors in her pregnant womb.

Straightway the deities of the Abyss in various troops come running from all sides to the lofty portals. Oh how strange, oh how horrible the shapes! how much of terror and death is in their eyes! Some print the earth with beastly tracks, and on a human head have twining snakes for hair; and behind them writhes an immense tail that like a whip coils and uncoils itself.

There are many other exciting supernatural touches in the story, but there are also many human moments, quieter moments, when individuals are trying to decide what to do, whether to fight or to search out a lost love, whether to indulge in private disputes or put aside pride to commit to a greater cause. Despite the miraculous events and supernatural intervention, there is still a core of humanity in the epic, telling the story of men struggling with the competing demands of desire, conscience, faith, and frailty. Tancred and Godfrey and Armida and Erminia and Argante and Solyman and many others are quite human, filled with their own wishes and desires even while they're competing in a terrible war to control Jerusalem.

It is certainly a useful view into the minds of men 500 years ago, but it's also an entertaining bit of art that, despite its flaws, stands on its own as an absorbing work of imagination.

Historians and fantasy nerds can both find a lot to engage them here. Recommended.

View all my reviews