Orlando Furioso

ORLANDO FURIOSO: PART TWO

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO was born in 1474, the son of an official of the Ferrarese court. He first studied law, but later acquired a sound humanistic training. His adult life was spent in the service of the Ferrarese ducal family. Essentially he was a writer; his lifetime’s service as a courtier was a burden imposed on him by economic difficulties. His fame rests on his major work, Orlando Furioso. The poem was probably begun about 1505. It was first published in 1516. The most important of Ariosto’s minor works are five comedies, written for production in the Ferrarese court. Ariosto died in 1533.

BARBARA REYNOLDS was for twenty-two years Lecturer in Italian at Cambridge University and subsequently Reader in Italian Studies at Nottingham University and Honorary Reader at Warwick. Her first book was a textual reconstruction of the linguistic writings of Alessandro Manzoni. The General Editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary, she was created Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 1978. She has been awarded silver medals by the Italian Government and by the Province of Vicenza and the Edmund Gardner Prize for her services to Italian scholarship and to Anglo-Italian cultural relations. She has been Visiting Professor in Italian at the University of California, Berkeley, at Wheaton College, Illinois, and at Hope College, Michigan, where she has been awarded Honorary Doctorates, and at Trinity College, Dublin. Barbara Reynolds has translated Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Paradiso, left unfinished by Dorothy L. Sayers on her death in 1957, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, for which she was awarded the Monselice International Literary Prize in 1976, for Penguin Classics. She is the author of The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Encounter with Dante and Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul.

ORLANDO FURIOSO

(THE FRENZY OF ORLANDO)

A Romantic Epic by
Ludovico Ariosto

PART TWO

TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BARBARA REYNOLDS

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Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

This translation first published 1977

15

Introduction, translation and notes copyright © Barbara Reynolds, 1977

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196051-7

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. The Structure of the Poem:

Patterns of Balance

Patterns of Totality

Patterns of Intricacy Resolved

Intricacy of Combats

II. The Development of the Poem

III. Reality and Fantasy

PRINCIPAL NEW CHARACTERS AND DEVICES

Men

Women

Personifications

Monsters

Supernatural Beings

Horse

Anonymous Characters

CANTOS XXIV-XLVI

MAP OF ASTOLFO’S JOURNEY

DIAGRAMS

The Combat near Merlin’s Fountain

The Combat on the Island of Lampedusa

NOTES

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

INTRODUCTION

1. THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM

THE present translation, for purposes of convenience, is divided into two volumes. This does not correspond to Ariosto’s intention. Unlike Boiardo, he chose not to split his poem into individually numbered books. The madness of Orlando occurs at the end of Canto XXIII. In respect of the number of cantos, it occupies a central position; in respect of the number of stanzas, the mid-point is reached where Isabella, about to kill herself in grief at the death of Zerbino, is persuaded by a hermit to dedicate her life to God.1 This is characteristic of the way in which the focus of emphasis appears to shift throughout the work. Unlike Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio’s Decamerone and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Ariosto’s epic is not arranged in accordance with any precise numerical plan. The cantos themselves range in number of stanzas from 72 to 199. Ariosto apologizes for the length of some which are relatively short, while for the two longest (xVIII and xLIII) he makes no excuse whatever.

The absence of structural divisions, the interweaving of varied themes, the frequent interruptions, the lack of unity in the Aristotelian sense incurred the condemnation of late sixteenth-century critics and poets, notably of Tasso and of Ronsard, for whom the Orlando Furioso was ‘a deformed and monstrous body’.2 The principles of literary criticism after the Counter-Reformation were weighted against the likelihood of discerning structure in the poem. Theorists looked for what was not there and failed to see what was.

There is some danger among modern readers of erring in the opposite direction and of assuming that the absence of an obvious control of form signifies a willing surrender to a dream-world of surrealism and confusion.