This is just a heads-up to remind any of you who might be interested about the latest in the Central Library's Tāmaki Untold series: a set of short papers designed to celebrate the recent donation of more than 200 pre-1801 books from the collection of my friend and mentor Professor Don Smith to Auckland Libraries earlier this year.
[NB: Previous talks in the series can be accessed at this link].
Here are some more details about Saturday's event:
If you'd like to know more, there's further information available at this link.
•
Jane Wild: l-to-r: Mark Houlahan, Shef Rogers, Jack Ross & Renee Orr (8/11/25)[9/11/25]: Well, the Symposium has now taken place, and - from my point of view, at any rate - seemed to go very well. I found Mark Houlahan's and Shef Roger's papers both amusing and informative. I hope the same was true of my own.
In any case, it was great to see so many old friends there - as well as Don Smith's wife Jill, and his two daughters Penelope and Caitlin.
Here's the text of what I had to say - though I suspect I added a few asides here and there. These will no doubt be available on the podcast recording which the library is planning to release on its Tāmaki Untold site sometime soon.
It remains just to thank the incomparable Jane Wild and her research and special collections team at the Auckland Central Library - Renee Orr, Andrew Henry, Florette Cardon, Ian Snowdon, Annette Keogh and Julian Lubin - for their indispensable help with this event.
•
Sir John Harington: Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1634)
Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso:
Prof. D. I. B. Smith & the Italian Epic
Cosa non detta in prosa mai né in rima
When I was asked to speak about one item from Don Smith’s collection, I chose his copy of the revised, 1634 edition of Sir John Harington's 1591 verse translation of Italian poet Lodovico Ariosto’s early sixteenth-century epic Orlando Furioso – "Roland run Mad" might be a good translation of that title.
Why? Partly because I like Ariosto; but also because this, the first full version of his work in English, has its own peculiar interest. Its author, Sir John Harington, was "an English courtier, author and translator, popularly known as the inventor of the flush toilet." Taking that last point first:He was the author of the description of a flush-toilet forerunner ... in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), a political allegory and coded attack on the monarchy ...The toilet in question, though actually installed in his Kelston house, was used in his book mainly as a metaphor for the "backed-up" nature of business at court: Ajax = A jakes. Get it? Harington was a friend and supporter of the last of Elizabeth I's favourites, the glamorous Earl of Essex, whose failed attempt at a coup d'état against the aging Queen led to a slew of executions in the final years of her reign.
Characteristically, Harington himself escaped any dire consequences by acting as an informant against his former patron. As he put it in his most famous epigram:Treason doth never prosper? What's the reason?Harington first came to court in the 1580s. His poetry and witty conversation earned him immediate favour from the Queen, but he “was inclined to overstep the mark in his somewhat Rabelaisian and occasionally risqué pieces.” When the first sections of his Orlando Furioso began to circulate, the Queen had had enough:
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.Angered by the raciness of his translations, Elizabeth told Harington that he was to leave and not return until he had translated the entire poem. She … considered the task so difficult that it was assumed Harington would not bother to comply. Harington, however, chose to follow through with the request and completed the translation in 1591.His later years at the court of King James were less happy. He was (briefly) imprisoned for debt, and even after being pardoned by the King, who made him tutor to the Prince of Wales, Harington failed to prosper. The job came to a premature conclusion when his pupil died of typhoid fever. Harington followed him two weeks later.
He's not an entirely forgotten man, however:Harington appeared as a ghost in an episode of South Park in 2012. He seizes this opportunity to explain how to use his invention, the toilet, properly.I suspect, though, that he would prefer to be remembered for the immense labour involved in translating the lion's share of Orlando Furioso’s 38,736 lines. To give you some standard of comparison, Milton's Paradise Lost contains roughly 10,000 lines – incidentally, Milton copied his famous line "Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme" from Ariosto's phrase "cosa non detta in prosa mai, né in rima". Only Spenser's incomplete Faerie Queene (1590-96), clocking in at over 36,000 lines, can rival the sheer scope of Ariosto's masterpiece, first published, in part, in 1516; in full, in 1532.
Let's take a look at its opening lines. Here's Ariosto's description of his plans for the poem:Le donne, i cavallier, l'arme, gli amori,Harington has these as:
le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto,
che furo al tempo che passaro i Mori
d'Africa il mare, e in Francia nocquer tanto,
seguendo l'ire e i giovenil furori
d'Agramante lor re, che si diè vanto
di vendicar la morte di Troiano
sopra re Carlo imperator romano.Of Dames, of Knights, of armes, of loues delight,Ariosto goes on:
Of courtesies, of high attempts I speake,
Then when ye Moores transported all their might
On Africke seas, the force of France to breake:
Incited by the youthfull heate and spight
Of Agramant their king, that vowd to wreake
The death of King Trayana (lately slaine)
Vpon the Romane Emperour Charlemaine.Dirò d'Orlando in un medesmo trattoHere’s Harington’s version:
cosa non detta in prosa mai, né in rima:
che per amor venne in furore e matto,
d'uom che sì saggio era stimato prima;
se da colei che tal quasi m'ha fatto,
che 'l poco ingegno ad or ad or mi lima,
me ne sarà però tanto concesso,
che mi basti a finir quanto ho promesso.I will no lesse Orlandos acts declare,Compared to Italian, English is a language poor in rhymes. It can be hard for poets not to rhyme in Italian: they spring up naturally as a result of having so many similar endings for their words.
(A tale in prose ne verse yet sung or sayd)
Who fell bestraught with loue, a hap most rare,
To one that earst was counted wise and stayd:
If my sweet Saint that causeth my like care,
My slender muse affoord some gracious ayd,
I make no doubt but I shall haue the skill,
As much as I haue promist to fulfill.
In English, on the other hand, fluent rhyming is desperately difficult to achieve, and those good at it are a breed apart. Ostentatiously clever rhymes tend to sound comic and A. A. Milne-ish, though, unless you're very careful to maintain a formal register.
None of the English versions of Ariosto can really be said to achieve his witty lightness of touch. Probably the closest thing to it in our language would be Byron's Don Juan – and that's more social satire than fantasy. Ben Jonson described Harington’s Orlando Furioso as of " all translations ... the worst" – though unfortunately his host William Drummond, who made a record of the poet's conversation, failed to explain why.
It's true that Harington takes considerable liberties with Ariosto's original text – even here, at the outset of the poem. What, for example, is his justification for transforming the poet's captious mistress (Alessandra Benucci) – referred to in the Italian simply as "colei" [she] – into "my sweet Saint"? Is it possible he intended to invoke Gloriana herself as his muse?
As Jane Everson put it in her 2005 article on Harington's translation:That Harington significantly abbreviated the text of the Orlando furioso is well known; what has not been closely studied is how he does so and the extent to which his modifications are not linguistically but culturally motivated. A close reading reveals changes designed to take account of differing cultural, political, and ideological factors between early sixteenth-century Ferrara and Elizabethan England.Harington’s own justification for this practice was simpler:For my omitting and abreuiating some things, either in matters impertinent to vs, or in some too tedious flatteries of persons that we neuer heard of, if I haue done ill, I craue pardon; for sure I did it for the best … But yet I would not haue any man except, that I should obserue his phrase so strictly as an interpreter, nor the matter so carefully, as if it had bene a storie, in which to varie were as great a sin, as it were simplicitie in this to go word for word.That last sentence seems to invite comparison with translations of Holy Writ, which, by definition, require absolute attentiveness to the meaning and placement of each word.
•
In the section on Ariosto in his 1936 book The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis claimed that the ideal happiness he would choose, "if he were regardless of futurity":would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.Nowadays, when we use the term “Italian Epic”, we tend to mean Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy. But that’s not what C. S. Lewis was referring to.
No, for him – and for Sir John Harington and his contemporaries – “Italian epic” meant narrative poets such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. And all of them – it’s important to note – appeared in English long before Dante. The first full translation of the Divine Comedy didn’t actually appear until 1785–1802. Henry Cary's, the first to be widely read, didn’t come out till 1814. Nor is it an accident that this coincided with the rise of the Romantic movement.
Mind you, educated English readers were expected to have enough Italian to follow Dante in the original – but then, the same argument would apply to the other poets in the list above. So why did they overshadow him for so long?
Perhaps simply because they’re so much more light-hearted and entertaining. The first major poem in this vein was by Luigi Pulci (1432-1484):an Italian diplomat and poet best known for his Morgante, an epic and parodic poem about a giant who is converted to Christianity by Orlando and follows the knight in many adventures.At one of our last meetings, Don Smith offered me his own two-volume pocket edition of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. He'd been meaning to translate it himself, he said, but felt that he would never now have the leisure or concentration for the job. And yet it was, he claimed, an essential stepping-stone in the road from Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato to its scene-stealing sequel, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. And (unlike them) it had never been translated in full into English!
I'm sorry to say that I turned him down. I’d already Englished a few pieces by Petrarch – and those were difficult enough to give me some idea of what a Sisyphean task such a translation would be. I'm glad to announce, though, that the job has finally been completed:In 1983 the Italian-American poet Joseph Tusiani translated in English all 30,080 verses of this work ... [It was] published as a book in 2000.Before that, all that non-Italian-speaking readers had to go on was Byron's 1822 version of Canto One.
Pulci’s contemporary Matteo Maria Boiardo (1440-1494) is best known for his epic poem Orlando innamorato [Orlando in Love]. He grew up in Ferrara, at the court of the d’Este family, who became his patrons.The first translation of Boiardo into English was Robert Tofte's Orlando Inamorato: The Three First Bookes (1598) ...Unfortunately for his posthumous reputation, Boiardo himself fell victim to the Italian vernacular culture wars.Pietro Bembo's reformation of the language in 1525, the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the 1530s, and the incipient Counter-Reformation in the 1540s all caused [Orlando Innamorato] to fall from favour amongst critics and writers … who found it lacking on linguistic, theoretical, and moral grounds. Gradually, Boiardo's original version was supplanted by Francesco Berni's rifacimento (1542), a recasting of the poem in literary Tuscan ...It wasn't until the nineteenth century that Boiardo's original was rediscovered, and he began to take his proper place as one of the greatest Italian poets of the quattrocento.
It’s a shame, because Ariosto’s poem is a direct sequel to Bioardo’s, and requires at least some knowledge of the former poem for much of the action to make sense: the endless misadventures of Angelica, daughter of the King of the Indies, for instance.
Like its predecessor, Orlando Furioso:describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions into many sideplots. [Here, however] The poem is transformed into a satire on the chivalric tradition.It's hard to exaggerate the far-ranging influence of Ariosto's epic. Its satire was far more subtle and subversive than Pulci's slapstick burlesque. The sheer pointlessness of chivalric endeavour was revealed through the endless (often absurd) additions Ariosto made to the original bald outline of Charlemagne's struggle with the Moors of Spain.
These include Astolfo's famous journey to the Moon in search of Orlando's lost wits. Assisted by John the Evangelist, who lends him Elijah's fiery chariot for the purpose, Astolfo is astonished to see that the Moon, far from being the perfect, crystalline sphere described by contemporary cosmology, is in fact a kind of rubbish heap for everything lost or mislaid on Earth. He’s nevertheless successful in locating the bottle the mad knight’s wits have been stored in, and manages to induce him to inhale them, thus restoring his equilibrium.
The women in Ariosto’s story, too, are far more proactive than the usual blushing subjects of romance. They include Angelica, the principal heroine, perpetually in flight from one lovelorn swain or another; but also Morgana (the original "fata Morgana") who’s on the point of destroying the world with her enchantments when she is finally defeated by the astute Orlando.
Ariosto himself has been credited with the first use of the term “humanism” – “umanesimo” in Italian. Like most Renaissance thinkers, he saw himself mainly as a rediscoverer of the truths of antiquity: in this case the humanitas of Cicero. The satirical thrust of his creative work, however, invites comparison with Cervantes’s 17th-century novel Don Quixote.
It’s debatable whether the full extent of his iconoclasm was apparent to English readers such as Edmund Spenser, author of his own immensely serious – and, to be honest, somewhat ponderous – epic, The Faerie Queene. Perhaps that’s why Ben Jonson referred to Harington’s Orlando as “of all translations the worst.” The sceptical, worldly Jonson got it. Did Harington? Maybe not.
Unfortunately Ariosto, despite the obvious affinities of his work with the tropes of modern Speculative Fiction, is now little read outside literature classes: the immense length of his poem, and the decline of narrative verse as a medium for storytelling is no doubt largely responsible for this.
However, if you can bring yourself to open the pages of – say – Barbara Reynold’s fluent verse translation of the whole poem, available as a Penguin Classic, I’d say you were in for a treat. Whether the same can be said of Harington’s version is a matter of opinion. The book itself is gorgeous, though, full of notes and illustrations, and closely modelled on the earliest Venetian editions of the original text.
•
I'll add here any further information or links that come to hand over time:
- The full set of plates from Don Smith's copy of the 1634 edition of John Harington's translation are now available here, on the Auckland Council Libraries' Kura: Heritage Collections Online site.
- A fuller account of my own collection of books on the Italian Epic tradition can be found here, on my bibliography site A Gentle Madness.
- "Three 'illuminating talks' at the Don Smith Symposium." Auckland library Heritage Trust blog (8/11/25)
