Where Orlando Loses It but Gets It Back

By Ludovico Ariosto - Orlando Furioso (Oxford World's Classics) (1999-02-12) [Paperback] by Ludovico Ariosto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you've got the time, this is amazing.

Partly, I wanted to track down whatever stuff Don Quixote had been reading, see what he loved so much, and this is one of those chivalric stories (a long epic poem, actually) that he supposedly read. And yeah, it's very cool. I'd like to have a chat with Don Quixote about it.

This poem by Ariosto is the continuation of another Italian poem--Orlando Innamorato, or Orlando in Love, [or Roland, actually, to use a more familiar form of his name], written by Boiardo--but that poem was less successful and has received much less attention over time than this continuation. The Orlando here is the same Roland we might know better from The Song of Roland, the story of Charlemagne's withdrawal from Muslim Spain back to France, where Roland and his men, the rear guard of the army, are ambushed by a Muslim army (or a Basque army, depending on the version) and Roland is reluctant to use his horn to call for help. This epic brings together many of stories found in other forms that are collectively called the Matter of France, mostly stories of Charlemagne's knights. The so-called Matter of Britain, mostly King Arthur stories, is thrown into the mix.

In general, this tells how certain key knights (including women, several of whom are nearly unbeatable) participate in the war between North African Muslims on the one side, who are trying to take Paris, and the multi-national force of Christians led by Charlemagne, who are trying to defend it. Most of the story, though, follows individuals as they go on separate quests and fight strangers and save maidens or warriors or whoever from monsters and sorceresses and all sorts of bad guys, especially the type who will stand on bridges and challenge all comers. The story starts with Orlando in love with Angelica, though she doesn't love him back (because they drank from different magic streams in the original poem by Boiardo) and he is chasing after her. Other knights are just as in love with her, which she doesn't enjoy. The "furioso" part of the book (meaning crazy, not angry) comes in the middle when Orlando learns Angelica has fallen in love with someone else and has gone off to live with him. (She leaves the story at that point.) He loses his reason, rips off his clothes, and starts tearing up the countryside, killing people everywhere he goes.

(The English knight Astolfo goes to save Orlando, with direction from a kind sorcerer. He rides a hippogriff to Africa, where he helps the Christian king Prester John with his harpy problem and has many adventures, eventually being allowed to ride Elijah's flaming chariot up to the moon where lost things, like Orlando's wits, can be found. He eventually restores them to Orlando, who as a result no longer loves Angelica.)

One of the best passages, earlier on in the poem, tells how Angelica is captured (even though she is a top fighter) and is chained to a rock like Andromeda to be a sacrifice to the sea creature called an orc.

The orc, seeing the shadow cast by the spreading wings flitting here and there across the water, left its certain prey awaiting it on shore and started a furious chase, curving and coiling, after the elusive one instead. Ruggiero dropped down and struck a blow, like an eagle dropping from the sky when it has spotted a snake weaving through the grass, or lying on a bare stone in the sun...

Ruggiero--supposedly an actual ancestor of the poet's patrons, the Este family, even though he was a Muslim--defeats the orc and rescues her from the rock with the help of the hippogriff that Astolfo later rides to Africa. He gives her a ring of invisibility and she uses it to go hide from all the guys trying to find her.

So many modern fantasy elements and tropes are found here that, with a little revision and updating of some 500-year-old stylist things, it could be on the shelves beside LotR or Wheel of Time or Mistborn books. Like a grandpa fantasy near it's descendants.

The original ~40,000-line poem in Italian was in ottava rima stanzas, which rhymed abababcc. There are English versions that attempt a similar format, but that's a terrible thing to do to a nice poem. This translation is given in prose, split into paragraphs, written in a way that doesn't do violence to the poem's meaning. The only sign of the original format is a / placed between stanza breaks. This translation is very readable with only a hint of quaintness, and it has an extensive annotated index in the back for those of us who need help remembering who is Brandimart (a knight who is Orlando's best friend) and who is Bradamant (a female knight who ends up marrying Ruggiero) and things like that.

I read this in tiny pieces. That worked for me. I don't know about other readers. In any case, I really enjoyed it. 5 stars.

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Where Petrarch Like Likes Laura

The Poetry of Petrarch by Francesco Petrarca
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not attempting to be a poetry critic. I am a "reading for fun" critic. IMO, Petrarch's not that fun. A little. 3 stars.

I found some poems and lots of lines that are fantastic, well worth reading, and I have some good things to say overall. But in general, as a book for passing some quiet moments, this isn't that great. As alway, YMMV, but I don't think most modern readers would enjoy steadily reading through this book very much.

I'll give the translator all the credit in the world. This reads well in English; though it doesn't rhyme, and I don't think a lot of attention was given to rhythm (though some, clearly), this is still poetry, much of it still able to connect with a modern reader. It sounds good.

It's just that it's almost all--and famously so--aimed at the one particular beautiful woman that he fell in love with as a young man and only kinda knew, and it gets tiresome. There are only so many puns on her name (Laura, connected to laurel trees, and l' aura, a wind, and a similar word for gold) that can be used before you're tired of them; there are only so many references to the lights of her eyes or the path her feet have trod that you can take before you have had enough of those. The first 150 poems or so feel like he's playing, pretending to be sick with love, as if he'd randomly chosen her to be his muse for a display of courtly love in poetry. But the longer he goes on, especially the years after her death, the more it sounds like an unhealthy delusion, a life wasted on the unattainable woman he turned into a saint.

Just too much.

Still, some of it's pretty. Here's how he feels (#292) about being left alive after she had died:

...and still I live, which makes me sad and angry,
abandoned by the light I loved so much,
lost in a storm, on a dismasted ship.

So let my love song have an end here now;
the vein of my accustomed wit is dry,
and all my lyre can produce is sobs.

And this expression (#300) is excessive, but just within bounds, perhaps:

How much I envy you, you greedy earth,
who get to clasp the one who's taken from me...

His last poems, when he's feeling old and Laura has been dead a long time, are so sad and pathetic and overly religious I want to shake him. Find someone else! What are you doing? It feels like mania, not an homage. And the same figures of speech get reused over and over. Maybe the excess is the point. I dunno.

Overall--some great, long-admired, critically-acclaimed, beautiful poetry. Too much of a good thing, probably.

My recommendation if you want to enjoy these more than me: pick a poem at random, just one, and read it carefully. Enjoy it. Pull it apart if you like, or just let it roll over you. But stop there. Don't keep shoveling them in like eating sour patch kids, one after another, until your stomach hurts and your mouth is sore. Too much. One at a time. Wait a week or two and choose another one. Space it out.

Mildly recommended.

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