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adam_mcphee 's review for:
Orlando Furioso, Part One
by Ludovico Ariosto
Boiardo combined the Matter of France (the chansons de geste) with the Matter of Britain (boring King Arthur stuff) and the Matter of Rome (classical myth and history as remembered by medievals) plus Christian allegory and all of the stories that were starting to trickle into Europe as people explored the outside world. What you got was Orlando Innamorato, a great poem that feels like an odd mix, and very late medieval.
Ariosto's sequel runs this stuff through his ideas of verisimilitude and irony, and the resulting poem feels alive. It feels new, even all these centuries later. The verisimilitude, I'm convinced, comes straight from the new methods of Renaissance painting. (Admittedly the irony didn't feel as prominent to me as when I'd read Guido Waldman's prose translation a few years ago.) I love this poem. It's important to me.
This time around (and I'm still only in the first half), the characters that stuck out to me were Orlando and Angelica.
I was disappointed by Orlando last time because, still being relatively new to the chansons de geste, I wanted Roland. Heroics and all that. But this time around I was ready and prepared for the slightly subversive take on his now lovelorn character. Though there are still heroics: he fights pirates, gunmen and a seamonster before his insanity sets in.
Angelica I'm still not sure what to make of. The one area where Boiardo beats Ariosto is in his treatment of women and non-europeans. In the Innamorato, they can compete on equal footing. Here, virtuous pagans are doomed to convert. Angelica goes from Boiardo's mix of femme fatale, Helen of Troy, and even a sort of Penelope rallying her various suitors to her defence to Ariosto's scared teenager on the run. It's the most jarring change of character from Boiardo to Ariosto. It's hard to know what to make of it, for every bit of proto-feminism, Ariosto has something equally misogynistic.
My favourite characters are still Astolfo and Marfisa, who went from being comic relief in Boiardo to gaining dignity in Ariosto. A very sweet moment happens on the road to Damascus when they're happy to run into each other and tell each other of their adventures, and then the shame Marfisa feels when she accidentally abandons him leaving Alessandressa makes it all the more poignant.
The Siege of Paris made more sense on this second reading, how couldn't it? It's easier to keep track of the enemy characters, and Reynolds does such a good job of laying out the battle on her maps. Likewise with incorporating Rinaldo's Scotland adventure into the battle of Paris, which I think I missed last time. The best episodes, generally, are the ones that divert the most from the standard trope of a knight errant accidentally stumbling upon adventure in the woods and being forced into a joust: Alcina's island, the nautical episodes featuring Olimpia and the Ebudans, the Amazon episode, the Tournament in Damascus, Rodomont's sacking of Paris.
The contemporary bits are starting to make a bit more sense to me as I learn more about the House of Este, but they still don't interest me much. Still, it's wild just how much material Ariosto is able to cram into this poem.
Ariosto's sequel runs this stuff through his ideas of verisimilitude and irony, and the resulting poem feels alive. It feels new, even all these centuries later. The verisimilitude, I'm convinced, comes straight from the new methods of Renaissance painting. (Admittedly the irony didn't feel as prominent to me as when I'd read Guido Waldman's prose translation a few years ago.) I love this poem. It's important to me.
This time around (and I'm still only in the first half), the characters that stuck out to me were Orlando and Angelica.
I was disappointed by Orlando last time because, still being relatively new to the chansons de geste, I wanted Roland. Heroics and all that. But this time around I was ready and prepared for the slightly subversive take on his now lovelorn character. Though there are still heroics: he fights pirates, gunmen and a seamonster before his insanity sets in.
Angelica I'm still not sure what to make of. The one area where Boiardo beats Ariosto is in his treatment of women and non-europeans. In the Innamorato, they can compete on equal footing. Here, virtuous pagans are doomed to convert. Angelica goes from Boiardo's mix of femme fatale, Helen of Troy, and even a sort of Penelope rallying her various suitors to her defence to Ariosto's scared teenager on the run. It's the most jarring change of character from Boiardo to Ariosto. It's hard to know what to make of it, for every bit of proto-feminism, Ariosto has something equally misogynistic.
My favourite characters are still Astolfo and Marfisa, who went from being comic relief in Boiardo to gaining dignity in Ariosto. A very sweet moment happens on the road to Damascus when they're happy to run into each other and tell each other of their adventures, and then the shame Marfisa feels when she accidentally abandons him leaving Alessandressa makes it all the more poignant.
The Siege of Paris made more sense on this second reading, how couldn't it? It's easier to keep track of the enemy characters, and Reynolds does such a good job of laying out the battle on her maps. Likewise with incorporating Rinaldo's Scotland adventure into the battle of Paris, which I think I missed last time. The best episodes, generally, are the ones that divert the most from the standard trope of a knight errant accidentally stumbling upon adventure in the woods and being forced into a joust: Alcina's island, the nautical episodes featuring Olimpia and the Ebudans, the Amazon episode, the Tournament in Damascus, Rodomont's sacking of Paris.
The contemporary bits are starting to make a bit more sense to me as I learn more about the House of Este, but they still don't interest me much. Still, it's wild just how much material Ariosto is able to cram into this poem.