Jerusalem Delivered: An English Prose Version

Jerusalem Delivered

The angel Michael shows Godfrey the winged militia of Heaven assisting the Crusaders (18.92). An engraving by Bernardo Castello in a 1617 Genoese edition of the poem, in the Purdy Library, Wayne State University.

Jerusalem Delivered

TORQUATO TASSO

An English Prose Version Translated and Edited by Ralph Nash

Copyright © 1987

by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights are reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-1830-0     ISBN-10: 0-8143-1830-4

eISBN: 978-0-8143-3756-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tasso, Torquato, 1544–1595.

Jerusalem delivered.

Translation of: Gerusalemme liberata.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Godfrey, of Bouillon, ca. 1060—1100—Poetry.

2. Crusades, First, 1096–1099—Poetry. I. Nash,

Ralph, 1925–      II. Title.

PQ4642.E21N37    1987    851′.4    86-32607

ISBN: 0-8143-1829-0

ISBN 0-8143-1830-4 (pbk.)

Contents

Chronology of the Life of Tasso

Introduction

Jerusalem Delivered

The Allegory of the Poem

Glossary of Names and Places

Bibliography of Books Cited

Index of Characters in the Poem

Chronology of the Life of Tasso

NOTE: For biographical details, see C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge, 1965).

1544 Birth, March 11, Sorrento, near Naples

1554 Arrival in Rome to join his exiled father, Bernardo

1556 Death of his mother, Porzia, in Naples

1560 Enrollment at University of Padua to study law

1562 Publication of Rinaldo

1565 Completion of studies at Padua, without degree. Arrival at Ferrara to enter service of Cardinal Luigi d’Este

1569 Death of Bernardo Tasso

1572 Shift of patrons, from Cardinal Luigi to Duke Alfonso d’Este

1573 Composition and successful performance of the pastoral drama L’Aminta (pirated publication, 1581)

1575 Draft of Gerusalemme Liberata completed and sent to various friends for criticism. Unauthorized departure from Ferrara to Rome

1579 Confinement as madman in Hospital of St. Anna, Ferrara

1581 Appearance of the first complete (unauthorized) editions of the Liberata, with huge success

1586 Release from St. Anna; various wanderings in search of patronage

1593 Publication of the drastically revised Liberata, under the title Gerusalemme Conquistata

1595 Death of Tasso, April 25, Rome

Introduction

I. Tasso’s Choice and Treatment of His Subject

From approximately 1560, when he was sixteen, until his publication of Gerusalemme Conquistata in 1593, at the age of forty-nine, Torquato Tasso was, if not constantly, at least intermittently at work on some form of rhymed stanzaic poem celebrating the First Crusade. This persistent effort over a third of a century produced, in this genre alone, three distinct poems (Rinaldo, 1562; Gerusalemme Liberata, 1581; Gerusalemme Conquistata, 1593); they total well over forty thousand printed lines—plus innumerable discarded phrases, lines, and stanzas. The Liberata has rightly been judged the chief product of all this labor, but it is pertinent to remember that Tasso never achieved a version of the Liberata that fully satisfied him. Indeed, one concludes that the poet never quite decided what ideal form he wanted the Liberata to embody. Hence the submission of his manuscript to his friends for their criticism, the wrangling in the Letters over questions of structure and decorum, the dissatisfaction with all printed versions, the incessant stylistic revisions—and ultimately the decision to reconstruct the poem into the Conquistata.

Yet in all this welter of poetic activity three basic intentions are always visible. The poet wants his poem to rival the Orlando Furioso. He wants it to imitate the ancients—especially the literary theory of the Poetics, and the poetic practice of the Iliad and the Aeneid. And he wants it firmly grounded on the truth of history and on true religion. The consequences of these three intentions are everywhere visible in the Liberata as it stands—and some tensions and contradictions between those intentions go far toward explaining the poet’s incessant revisions and continuing dissatisfactions. However, in a brief introduction, we must be unlike Tasso and content ourselves with the Liberata as it stands.

1. RELATION TO ARIOSTO

It is symptomatic that Bernard Weinberg, in his history of sixteenth-century Italian criticism, is able to organize the entire second part around a series of literary quarrels, the chief of which, according to Weinberg, is the Ariosto-Tasso quarrel.¹ Literary polemics make tedious reading for posterity, and the Ariosto-Tasso quarrel is replete with faults that have plagued the academic world from the Alexandrian age to our own: ill-founded pride and well-founded envy, the point-scoring techniques of the debating society, excessive trust in theory combined with mistrust of the taste of the reading public, positions taken chiefly in advancement of personal careers, and sundry associated ills. These factors frequently obscure the drift of the argument, but with Professor Weinberg’s aid we can see that the Ariosto-Tasso quarrel eventually polarizes into The Learned Tasso vs. The Native Genius Ariosto, and thence, more broadly speaking, into a quarrel of Ancients vs. Moderns.

Tasso himself made important contributions to the literature of this controversy.² Naturally he emphasizes the ways in which he thinks the Liberata is closer to ancient precept and example, and thereby superior to the Furioso—chiefly in its less exuberant fancy (which he calls its greater verisimilitude) and in its more obviously disciplined plot structure (which he calls its unity of action). These are indeed ways in which the Liberata differs significantly and consciously from the Furioso. But the atmosphere of controversy and mutual denigrations surrounding this literary quarrel should not obscure from the modern reader the fundamental truth that Tasso is resolved, first of all, to write a poem like Ariosto’s, with knights and ladies and their loves, complicated with episodes that lend a pleasing variety and, very often, an aura of the marvellous.³ The Furioso, extant less than fifty years when Tasso began the Liberata, naturally could not claim the reverence due the Iliad and Aeneid, but it is hardly too much to say that Tasso intends to imitate Ariosto.

Hence, for readers acquainted with the Furioso, one of the pleasures of reading Gerusalemme Liberata is to savor the skill of this imitation. For those unfamiliar with Ariosto, some obvious set passages are available—for example, the Garden of Armida (15.53–16.35) and its precedent in Ariosto’s Garden of Alcina (O.F. 6.19–7.33); or the flight of Erminia (6.109–7.4) and such Ariostian passages as the flight of Angelica in O.F. 1.33–44. But I choose for illustration a passage in which Tasso less clearly parallels an explicit action in the Furioso—that is, Armida’s first appearance in the Christian camp, in Canto Four. Characteristically, Tasso makes clear at the outset where the reader’s sympathies should lie. Armida is a pagan, acting on instructions from her uncle and guardian, whose plans are inspired by a wicked angel acting on instructions from Pluto himself (i.e., Satan). But thereafter Tasso as moral commentator recedes into the background and the episode proceeds very much in the manner of Ariosto. Proud of her beauty, and of the gifts of her sex and her youth (4.27), Armida undertakes to lead astray the important warriors in the Christian army. When she arrives, she passes through the camp like a new comet or star, gazed upon by all. Praised and desired Armida passes among the lustful troops; and she is aware of it; yet she gives no sign, though in her heart she smiles and projects great victories and plunders from it (4.33). Godfrey’s brother, Eustace, hastens to greet this apparition. Like the moth to the flame he turned himself to the splendor of her divine beauty; and he longed to observe more nearly her eyes, which a modest manner sweetly lowers; and he took the great flame from them, and lodged it home, as the neighboring fuel is wont from fire (4.34).

Thereupon, in a pleasing adaptation of Aeneas’s address to his goddess-mother Venus (Aeneid 1.325), Tasso has Eustace ask Armida’s name: Lady, if indeed such name befits you … let me know who you are; let me make no mistake in honoring you; and, if there is reason, kneel down (4.35). Armida evidently takes the allusion—at least she grasps his meaning—and professes herself not only mortal, but dead indeed to pleasures, alive only to sorrow (4.36). Thus subtly reinforcing Eustace’s awareness of the possible liveliness of her pleasures, she persuades him to take her to Godfrey, for whom she spins a plausible, circumstantial, and wholly fictitious tale of her past life and present circumstances (4.39–65).

There is no need to remark on every phrase. Throughout the canto, Tasso maintains a deft touch in presenting a poised and experienced Armida, working her will upon these naive warriors of the Western world. With a passing reminiscence of Horace’s laughing Lalage (Odes 1.22), he remarks: But while she sweetly speaks and sweetly laughs and makes their senses drunk with a double sweetness, she almost separates from their breasts their souls, not grown accustomed before to those immoderate pleasures (4.92). And at the canto’s end the poet extends his ironic view of man’s helpless enslavement by sexual desire, to encompass the great heroes of the classical world: Now what kind of marvel will it be if fierce Achilles was the prey of Love, and Hercules and Theseus, if even him who buckles on the sword for Christ the impious fellow catches in his toils? (4.96).

This summary regrettably slights the most distinctly Ariostian element in the canto—that is, the interpolated narrative in which Armida recounts her troubles. But what has been given here should suffice to demonstrate that Tasso well understands the uses of ironic detachment and comic undertone, and deliberately sets out to show what he can do in that vein. If that is granted, then it seems reasonable to speak of the Liberata’s imitation of Orlando Furioso.⁴ The relevance of this point will be clearer after some discussion of the Liberata as an exemplar of that major element in Italian Renaissance humanism, the imitation of classical models.

2. RELATION TO VIRGIL

One might as well speak in terms of Virgil alone, with the understanding that Tasso wishes, of course, to demonstrate also his familiarity with the Iliad and the Odyssey, with such lesser classical epics as the Thebaid, the Pharsalia, and the Argonautica, and indeed with the general range of classical poetry in other genres (as in the casual, almost automatic, appropriation of a phrase from Horace, noted above). But the Aeneid is Tasso’s primary object. One might say that Virgil is almost as omnipresent in the Liberata as he is in Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory. Virgilian phrases, details, situations, episodes, and ideas are echoed on virtually every page, and occasionally one meets with whole stanzas of direct translation. A few examples are instanced in my notes to the cantos, but Tasso’s method of imitating classical authors is a large subject, and I limit further discussion of it to the following general remarks on what I take to be one way in which humanist imitation is related to Tasso’s choice and treatment of his subject.

Virgil himself provided a model for Renaissance humanists in their imitation of their predecessors. Everyone knew that the Aeneid followed in the footsteps of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that the Eclogues were practically a pastiche from Theocritus. Moreover, by picking up a motif already present in Greek pastoral (Theocritus, Idyll 7; Moschus, Lament for Bion), Virgil popularized the identification of the poet as shepherd, and of the shepherd’s pipe as the poet’s talent, to be handed down from one generation to another (Eclogues 2.31–39; 6.64ff.). Thus he provided the Renaissance humanist with a symbol for the very process of his art. How consciously this symbol is employed may be seen in that most ardent imitator, Sannazaro, whose holy priest describes a reed hung up in the temple of Pan:

This reed was that one which the sacred God whom now you behold found in his hands when spurred by love he followed the beautiful Syrinx through these woods.… Thereafter it came, and I know not how, into the hands of a shepherd of Syracuse who, before any other, had the daring to play it without fear of Pan or of other God, beside the crystal waves of his native Arethuse: … He then overtaken by envious Death made this his last gift to Mantuan Tityrus.… After [Tityrus] came never a soul to these woods that has been able to play it with accomplishment, though many, spurred by ambitious daring, have attempted it oftentimes and attempt it still.⁵

From Pan to Theocritus to Virgil to the Renaissance humanists. It is a version of literary history.

That is, of course, the point of the preceding remarks. When Eustace’s gallantry adapts a passage from the Aeneid, Tasso is (in the language of pastoral) playing the pipes of Mantuan Tityrus. When Armida sets out to lead the knights astray from their Christian duty, Tasso (in the language of chivalric romance) is entering the lists to make proof of himself in the joust—in this case, with Ariosto. In the courtly Renaissance, such language of emulation and rivalry (sometimes decried as faction and envy) is simply everywhere; it pervades the age’s sense of human history. Whether poet or warrior, in literary or in political history, the individual is measuring himself, in public view, against the great exemplars of the past. It is a view that has considerable effect on Tasso’s poem.

3. RELATION TO TRUE HISTORY

The point that I have been preparing is best illustrated through the character of Rinaldo, first introduced to the reader as he "hangs intent on the lips of Guelph, and hears the exempla of his renowned ancestors. (1.10). When Rinaldo becomes a candidate for leadership of the Adventurers (5.14ff.), Tasso carefully points out that he wishes to be valued for his own merit rather than for his descent from a long line of heroes. Still, the long line is there, and it is the barbarous prince Gernando who scorns Rinaldo’s idle sum of ancient heroes" as meaningless if unaccompanied by actual political power. These early allusions to Rinaldo’s lineage are preparing the way, of course, for one of Tasso’s significant imitations of Ariosto—the linking of a major hero in the poem with the poet’s Ferrarese patrons, the ducal family of Este. We need not bore ourselves with the details of this poetry of patronage, but we should note Tasso’s method for introducing the material into the Liberata.

The poet entrusts the first full announcement of the theme to his chief theological spokesman, Peter the Hermit, who speaks of Rinaldo in visionary rapture:

Presages only and the labors of a boy are these, by which already Asia knows him and repeats his name. Lo, I see clearly as the years run on, that he opposes the wicked Augustus, and masters him; and under the shadow of her silver wings his eagle covers the Church and Rome, that she will have snatched from the talons of the beast: and sons well worthy of him will be born.

Sons from those sons, and they who will come from them will have from him famous and memorable examples; and they will defend the mitres and the holy temples from unjust Caesars and from rebels too. Their arts shall be these: to repress the proud, and raise up the weak, to defend the innocent and to punish the guilty. So it will come that the Eagle of Este flies beyond the roadways of the sun (10.75–76).

But the historical details are thereafter entrusted to the wiseman of Ascalon, who was once a pagan scientist, so self-satisfied that I thought then that my learning could be the sure and infallible measure of however much Nature’s mighty Maker could make (14.45). Converted by Peter Hermit to Christianity, he is still a scientist and, interestingly, a historian, who presents (and explicates) to Rinaldo a marvellous shield engraved with a visual history of the young man’s ancestors from Roman times to Rinaldo’s own day (17.58–80).⁶ The wiseman, like Peter Hermit, is a stern teacher, prefacing his remarks with the admonition that Rinaldo will see that he himself is still left behind, a slow runner in these noble lists for glory (17.65). And the shield obtains its intended effect on the young warrior: His proud spirit being moved with emulative virtue takes fire and is rapt away in such manner that that which he has in his mind through imagining (the city laid low, and taken, and its people killed) he thinks that he sees before his eyes even as if it were present and as if it were true (17.82). Thus the marvellous shield (itself a kind of imitation of Ariosto’s Tomb of Merlin—O.F. 3.7–60) is an artifact working upon the imagination to present a vivid imitation of history to a young man seeking to establish his own position in that history.

We need not propose that Tasso was especially conscious of a parallel between himself as imitative poet and Rinaldo as emulative warrior. Naturally enough, the heroic poet takes the heroic view of history, as adapted to the aristocracies and theocracies of his culture, presenting Rinaldo with an unbroken line of heroes extending before and after him, from Rome to the Renaissance. Presumably Tasso’s list of his own literary ancestors, within the genre of the Liberata, would be much more disjunctive and discriminating—from Homer to Virgil to Ariosto to Tasso perhaps, (with at least a loyal filial tribute to the Amadigi of his father, Bernardo). And presumably, as he labored on his poem, he tried to take the long view of history, reminding himself that in that view he was still a slow runner in these noble lists for glory.

Tasso’s choice of true history for his subject matter affects other aspects of his poem, beyond this possibly tenuous analogy between emulation as a response to political history and imitation as a response to literary history.⁷ For example, the poem displays a genuine zest for the sheer drama of history in the making. A notable example of this is the stanza preceding the climactic battle between Godfrey’s troops and the relieving force from Egypt:

It was a great and marvellous thing to see when this host and that came face to face, as with their units drawn up in order the signal is given now to move, now to make the charge. Loosed to the wind the pennons wave and the plumes on the mighty helmets nod in the breeze: uniforms and decorations, insignia, weapons and colors glitter and gleam in the sun with gold and steel (20.28).

Perhaps more significant is a less spectacular passage. When Charles and Ubaldo exhort Rinaldo to leave Armida’s garden, they do not speak of Virtue vs. Pleasure, as does the wiseman of Ascalon, or of Christian duty and of sin and repentance, as does Peter Hermit, but rather of the danger of missing out on the most important experience available to their generation. Ubaldo says:

All Asia and all Europe are going to war; whoever hungers for reputation and worships Christ is toiling now in arms in the Syrian lands: you alone, O son of Bertoldo, away from the world, in idleness, a little corner of the earth shuts in; you alone are nothing moved by the universal movement, the gallant champion of a girl (16.32).

The values are out of fashion now, as are Tasso’s values about public duty, hedonism, etc. But that should not dim our perception that this poem is beginning to show an interest in materials familiar to us later, in the historical novel. To be sure, it is a long way to War and Peace—but the journey to Ivanhoe seems not so far.

The eventual development of the novel seems to relate also to another aspect of the Liberata’s treatment of history: that is, the reflection within the poem of the slow drift toward realism in western European literature. Even though Tasso consciously fills his poem with examples of the marvellous, and anxiously defends their propriety, this very consciousness and anxiety strikes us as a sign that the old style is on the wane. At times, indeed, the newer mode of realistic treatment vies with the older mode, or supplants it, even within a single episode. Thus, when the pagan sorcerer Ismen brings Solyman into Jerusalem, through the very midst of the Frankish army, he surrounds his chariot and its occupants with a Virgilian magic shell of thickened air, invisible and impervious (cf. Aeneid I.41off.). Yet when he arrives beneath the city walls, the old sorcerer laboriously seeks out a small opening, hidden by bushes, and with some difficulty persuades the proud Solyman to crawl on hands and knees into what proves to be a secret underground passage to the king’s residence. Ismen explains:

[The great Herod] hollowed out this cave, when he wanted to put the bridle on his subjects; and by it (from that tower that he called Antonia, after his famous friend) he was able to withdraw, unseen of any, within the verges of the mighty ancient temple; and from there to issue out of the city secretly and to introduce men and let them out under concealment (10.31).

Here the marvellous gives way to an interesting bit of archaeological-historical detail out of Josephus (see 10.29n.). Sir Walter Scott would probably have supplied a note.

Somewhat similar is the diverse treatment of the journeys of Armida and Dame Fortune to the mid-Atlantic. Armida, when abducting the sleeping Rinaldo, merely has him laid upon her chariot and quickly traverses the sky (14.68). Her return to Syria is given in more detail, but still with supernatural means and supernatural speed:

… She seated herself on her chariot, which she had at hand, and is lifted up to the sky, as is her wont.

She treads the clouds and cleaves the winds in flight, surrounded with tempests and howling gales; she passes over the shores that lie beneath the opposite pole and regions whose inhabitants are unknown: she passes the boundaries of Hercules, and draws not near the land of the Hesperians or the Moors; but holds her course suspended above the wave until she comes to the sands of Syria (16.70–71).

Dame Fortune, bound on the same journey with her passengers, makes remarkable speed, to be sure, but by a conventional mode of transportation, and far less rapidly than Armida. Indeed, the poet specifies a four-day journey each way (15.23; 17.55) consuming some thirty-five stanzas outward bound, though only three in returning. We know that Tasso made determined resistance against the critics who wanted this journey deleted, and it is reasonable to assume that he was anxious to preserve the material developed in the episode. That material is, in various forms, historical—a survey of cities and sites (much of it seemingly based on Strabo and Herodotus), presented sometimes by Dame Fortune and sometimes by the poet himself; an occasional generalization on human history, notably in the remarks on Carthage (15.20); a remarkable amount of discussion of countries and cultures unknown to the Crusaders, with several lines directly based on a sixteenth-century travel book (15.41–42); and most notably, the renowned apostrophe to Christopher Columbus (15.30-32).

I have used these examples of Herod’s Cave and Dame Fortune’s voyage because they appear in the poem side by side with parallel material in no way dependent on the realities of topography, geography, and sixteenth-century history, thus providing a neat contrast between the older mode of poetry and a mode that is to become familiar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But still more convincing, though perhaps less neat, is Tasso’s ubiquitous concern with precision and a degree of historical accuracy in the military action of his poem, especially in demonstrating Godfrey’s grappling with problems of logistics, siege tactics, terrain, weaponry, political alliances, etc. Occasionally adapted from such true histories as the Gesta Francorum or William of Tyre, and partly directed toward the poem’s function of providing a model for Alfonso d’Este, this material is surely intended to portray the actual kind of difficulties to be expected by a multi-national army, dependent on tenuous lines of supply, in proceeding against a strong defensive position in a barren and hostile land. Such concerns appear only sporadically in Ariosto, and scarcely at all in Edmund Spenser—but they are part of the fabric of Tasso’s poem.

In these and in many other ways, the Liberata is a poem much preoccupied with the past, and with the relation of that past to the poet’s own present. This interest in verifiable secular history sets the poem apart from other major fictions of the sixteenth century, and indeed anticipates some later developments in Western European literature. Tasso, however, still views human history as a scene played out upon a stage—and the content of the drama is the working out of the Eternal Will. Thus we have to take into account not merely the poem’s relation to human history, but also its relation to what Tasso considered the eternal truths of the human condition, as expressed in his Allegory of the Poem.

4. RELATION TO PSYCHOLOGY

By his own admission, Tasso wrote the Allegory after the Liberata was half completed.⁸ Such post facto composition does argue against assuming that Tasso intended allegory from the beginning, but it does not argue against taking the Allegory seriously, as the poet’s reflection on symbolic meanings that had accumulated for him in more than a decade of work on his poem. In that spirit we may take the Allegory as the poet’s moralizing of his history.

Tasso is concerned chiefly with expounding two significant details: the strong city Jerusalem stands as a symbol of man’s pursuit of earthly felicity; and Godfrey and Rinaldo stand respectively for the rational and the wrathful faculties of the soul. Thus the historical Crusade becomes an Everyman story, of the individual’s attempt to reconcile disparate and warring elements in his nature in the pursuit of earthly happiness. This reading seems quite convincing enough: Tasso is able to cite specific lines that illustrate the point about Godfrey and Rinaldo, and we need not doubt that he did indeed consciously intend such meaning while working out his poem. Likewise with a further detail—the contrast between Peter Hermit as the representative of theology and the wiseman of Ascalon as the representative of pagan philosophy—this contrast is so woven into the texture of the poem as to compel our belief (see 17.60n.). Perhaps his remarks on Ismen and Armida strike us more as afterthoughts, but in general Tasso does present a credible interpretation of his poem’s inner meaning. In that regard, the Allegory of the Poem exemplifies a view of secular history that we expect from a sixteenth-century poet. The events of history are subordinate to God’s plan, its actors and phenomena standing for moral-theological truths that transcend the flux of historical process. In the extent and precision of his interest in secular history, Tasso may be somewhat ahead of the heroic poetry of his time, but his manner of viewing that history is thoroughly familiar in his period.

In one way, however, both the Liberata itself and Tasso’s Allegory of the Poem look forward. From beginning to end the Allegory is filled with reference to the manners or passions or discourses of the mind, this compound of body and soul and mind, its noblest part, i.e., the mind, contemplative man, the speculative intellect, the intellect … by God and Nature created lord over the other faculties of the soul, and the tension between the rational faculty and the concupiscent and irascible faculties. Such preoccupation with the mind, and with its relation to the body, does not necessarily go beyond the familiar trichotomy of reason, will, and appetite—but in reality, it does. The Liberata is filled with evidence of Tasso’s constant concern with psychology, and especially with the psyche out of control, or barely under control. In Tasso’s allegorizing, the main line of his action can be read in this way, as Godfrey with difficulty controls his irascible and amorous warriors. But even more interesting is an area about which Tasso does not care to be quite so explicit—the use of devils from hell to represent passions that drive men inexorably to their own destruction.

A few examples will illustrate the observation. Gernando, crown prince of Norway, is introduced to the reader as a monstrously proud man who values as in itself obscure any virtue that royal title does not render illustrious (5.17). Under the influence of a wicked spirit from Avernus, Gernando simply cannot bridle his tongue, even when he knows that every consideration of prudence calls for silence: Yet he does not get rid of his wrath, or put a bridle on that blind drive in himself that is leading him to death (5.24). Similarly with the agitator Argillan, who is one of the most sharply delineated minor characters in the poem:

This man, ready of hand, bold of tongue, impetuous and hot of temper, was born on the banks of Tronto and was weaned on hatred and scorn in civil strifes; driven into exile later, he filled with blood the mountains and the shores and pillaged that principality, until he came into Asia to follow the war, and became renowned for a better notoriety (8.58).

Such a man, weaned on hatred and scorn in civil strifes, is a likely target for the hellish spirit Alecto, who functions in the Liberata somewhat as does Ariosto’s outright allegorizing of Discord (O.F. 14.76–97, et passim). The case is a bit different from Gernando’s, in that Argillan’s inner virtues are deluded (8.59), and when he gathers followers Alecto mingles her poison with the fire in their breasts (8.72). That is, an external agent is more clearly active in furthering Argillan’s rebellion. Still, it is not for nothing that Argüían is portrayed as a born terrorist, raised on the civil broils of the Abruzzi. His psyche is predisposed to vent hatred and scorn against those in authority, especially when they are foreigners. As a third example, the enchanted wood is inhabited by spirits that take the shape of each man’s ruling passion—for Tancred, Clorinda; for Rinaldo, Armida. Probably most illustrative here is Tancred’s plight:

As sometimes the sick man who encounters in a dream dragon or tall chimaera girt with flame, although he suspects or partly knows that the simulacrum is no true shape, yet wants to flee, such terror the horrid and dreadful appearance implants in him; even so the intimidated lover not wholly believes the false deceits, and yet concedes and fears (13.44).

Surely these incidents in the action of the Liberata are related to Tasso’s preoccupation with the mind of man in his Allegory of the Poem. Tasso was beset by personal devils of his own, and any reader of his poem will note the profusion of metaphor and simile based on delusions of the sick and feverish mind. Among the most striking is the passage describing the fear of the first soldiers who encounter Ismen’s enchanted wood:

As an innocent child has not the courage to look where he has a foreboding of strange spirits, or as in shadowy night he is afraid, imagining monsters and prodigies still; so did they fear, without knowing what it can be for which they feel such terror—except that their fear perhaps creates for their senses prodigies greater than chimaera or sphinx (13.18).

We need not be overstressing the unfortunate incidents surrounding the commitment to St. Anna’s Hospital if we note that this poet is persistently concerned with the delusions and aberrations of the mind disturbed.

All this is not to claim that Tasso is remarkably acute in his reading of psychological motivation. Indeed, he is on the whole deficient in that regard, as he is, in general, deficient in comic spirit, so that he seems to us (if we think in those terms) less modern than Ariosto, Cervantes, Rabelais, or Shakespeare. But I have tried to indicate here that his poem is deeply affected by its concern with some of the gods we worship today: with History (by name to come called Historical Process), with the lesser god of Literary History, and with Psychology.

II. The Liberata in Relation to Spenser and Milton

Beyond its intrinsic value, Italian chivalric poetry bears an interest for the English reader because of its relevance for several significant English poets, and indeed for some writers of prose fiction, notably Sidney and Fielding. I confine my remarks to the Liberata’s relation to Spenser and Milton, offering a few addenda to a subject already thoroughly canvassed.⁹

Tasso came almost too late for Spenser, who conceived the Faerie Queene and executed much of it in the Ariostian vein, but the first installment of his poem (1590) does contain prominent examples of imitation and outright translation from the Liberata, as Spenser develops his episodes of the Lake of Idlenesse (F.Q. 2.6.2ff.) and the Bowre of Bliss (2.12.10ff.). In 1596, Spenser adapts Erminia’s excursion into the pastoral mode for his own Pastorella (6.9.5ff.). All these passages are splendidly done—one master poet’s acknowledgment of his kinship with a fellow master—but still the general consensus rightly holds that the Ariostian influence on Spenser is much more pervasive than the relatively ad hoc appearances of Tasso.

Why should this be? One clear hint lies in the fact that all the passages just cited involve Tasso’s excursions away from his central action, the clash of rival armies in the siege of a walled city. That was Ariosto’s action too, that time when the Moors came over the sea from Africa and did so much harm in France (O.F. 1.1), besieging Paris. But Ariosto’s comic diversity allows lust and greed and jealousy and love of adventure to scatter Charlemagne’s paladins all over the world (and even to the moon), until the reader remembers with difficulty that Christendom is being overwhelmed by pagandom. Tasso, on the other hand, locates some 90 percent of his action in Judaea and Syria, with organized armies involved in marches, assemblies, reviews, councils, embassies, foragings, night raids, assaults, and pitched battles—in short, the materials of classical epic. Great poets know what they are about—and Spenser, despite a remark about a possible sequel in his Letter to Ralegh, and a reference or two to Saracens in his poem,¹⁰ was not about to write a poem of kings and queens and generals and their armies. Hence a large part of the Liberata was not very useful to his poem.

The three major episodes cited above should be carefully examined (perhaps along with Fairfax’s verse translation of their sources in Tasso) by all readers interested in Spenser’s poetic skill. The borrowings have been repeatedly commented on, but it is perhaps worth noting here that Spenser’s Bowre of Bliss comes into conjunction not merely with the scene in Armida’s garden but also with the other scenes at 14.59ff. and 18.18ff. These supporting passages are not always taken into account.

From among numerous minor examples of Spenser’s knowledge of the Liberata," one may single out Redcrosse’s desire to give up this sinful terrestrial existence in order to enter at once into the bliss of heaven (F.Q. 1.10.62–4). Godfrey’s analogous desire, along with Hugh’s denial of it (G.L. 14.8–12), may be not so much an example of Tasso’s influence on Spenser as of a common emphasis by both poets on the primacy of the active life over the contemplative—a familiar theme in their century. But Spenser made his most extensive use of Tasso in recasting the materials of the present Books One and Two, and it is quite plausible that Godfrey’s vision in the Liberata would remind Spenser how suitable such somnium Scipionis material would be for a knight who is being promised sainthood, although he has only recently been contemplating suicide out of despair at his own sinfulness (1.9.38ff.).

Professor Brand, along with other scholars,¹² sees the Letter to Ralegh as somewhat indebted to Tasso’s Allegory for ideas about the general structure of the Faerie Queene. In agreeing with this general assessment, I suggest a further possible structural influence, specifically on Books One and Two, deriving from Tasso’s arranging of much of the Liberata through a series of parallels and opposites in characters and in actions. Since this aspect of Tasso’s structure seems to bear also on Paradise Lost, I defer further details to the discussion of Milton, to which I now turn.

Spenser utilizes Tasso much more directly than does Milton, whose general practice is to expropriate no more than a line or two at a time from his poetic sources, and usually to be content with an allusive blending of his predecessors. One obvious point of contact lies in their portrayals of Satan. Commentators frequently patronize Tasso for making his portrait (4.6-8) much more medieval than the Satan of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Such contrasts readily become over simplified; Milton is willing to present a medieval scene in the Lazar-house passage in Book Eleven (PL. 11.477ff.) and Tasso’s howling Scyllas and hissing Pythons, attendant on Satan, have a direct classical source in Virgil (Aeneid 6.285ff.). But, in general, it is true that although Milton respects Tasso and numbers him among the models to be followed, he does not find him directly useful for his own heroic verse.¹³

In one respect, however, both Spenser and Milton could have observed in Tasso a technique for organizing the materials of a long poem by inventing characters, episodes, and scenes that are formal parallels but moral opposites. For example, both Ismen and the wiseman of Ascalon are repeatedly called sorcerers (mago), and, as if to accentuate their parallelism, Tasso has made Ismen an apostate Christian whereas his opposite figure is a converted pagan (2.2; 14.45–7). But morally the two are diametrically opposed, being in effect practitioners of black magic and white magic. Likewise Armida, repeatedly called a sorceress, uses her black magic to create an ornate palace in an esoteric setting, not more marvellous than the cave-palace of the wiseman of Ascalon, who there provides Charles and Ubaldo with the necessary means for foiling Armida’s sorcery. The wiseman also arranges that Charles and Ubaldo have the assistance of the handmaiden of God, Dame Fortune herself (15.6), whose marvellous skiff becomes the counterpart to Armida’s Medea-like chariot, as noted above (p. xvi). The opposition here, like the opposition between the Christian and the pagan worlds which pervades the entire poem, is of course based ultimately on the struggle between Heaven and Hell—a struggle clearly present in the opposing roles of Alecto (especially), who receives her orders from Satan, and Raymond’s guardian angel who receives his orders from God (7.79ff.). We may add the more general combat scenes in which the hellish spirits fill the plains of the air (9.53) and Michael’s legions take part in the final assault on Jerusalem (18.92–7). In addition, Tasso has the rudiments of a council in Hell (or at least a speech by a dictator to his followers). Tasso’s council is not explicitly paralleled by a council in Heaven, as Milton’s is: but he makes clear that as his infernal council aims at the dispersal of the crusading armies, so God’s will is directed toward reassembling them (cf. 1.1; 4.17; 8.2–3; 13.73; 14.18).

Patently, these structural devices in the Liberata relate to the well-known parallelism of characters, scenes and episodes in the first two books of the Faerie Queene and the first three books of Paradise Lost, not to mention other examples.¹⁴ Moreover, in areas of his poem less clearly related to the direct struggle between good and evil, Tasso remains fond of arranging his characters in parallels and triangles, and is well aware of the usefulness of recurring thematic motifs.¹⁵ Thus, to say the least, the Liberata provides an example, within the genre of the heroic poem, of structural techniques that both Spenser and Milton found useful.

III. The Present Translation and Apparatus It is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet…

There will always be with us those who consider metrical form absolutely essential to poetry, even in translation. I do not call them soul-blind, but I do acknowledge that nothing I can say is likely to change their opinion. For the rest, I shall remark on the virtues that I have hoped to attain with my prosing.

I have aimed at all the accuracy I could manage, even to extremes perhaps, as in following Tasso’s indiscriminate mixing of tenses. Tasso’s sentence divisions are observed throughout, frequently at the cost of some formality in language and contortion in syntax—a notorious characteristic of Tasso’s style. And I have tried neither to suppress unconsciously the sometimes wearisome use of special devices such as chiasmus and antithesis, nor to suppress routinely all examples of deliberately Latinate diction. As an example of the latter, the word luster (1. 60, etc.) does exist in English and is retained (with a note), but a Latinate phrase like in dì solenne (1. 20) calls for paraphrase; in Italian or in English the meaning depends on knowledge of the Latin dies solennis.¹⁶

Perhaps a nobler aim than accuracy is that of enabling the reader to read smoothly and rapidly—which I take to be one of the effects of the absence of rhyme. Much is indeed lost when metrical form is abandoned, even though stanzaic division is retained; and I comfort myself for the loss with the hope that this version will at least emphasize one of the qualities that the Renaissance most highly prized in heroic poetry—its abundant variety of action. In these chivalric poems especially, when the language does not slow the reader, he will inevitably pause at times to wonder how the poem has moved so far so fast.

Annotation has been kept as minimal as seems feasible for an anticipated audience of students with slight knowledge of classical and continental literature. One device for minimizing annotation is the Glossary of Names and Places. Those who are reading this introduction before reading the text are advised to consult the Glossary whenever a geographical or personal name appears in an unannotated passage that seems to call for annotation. In referring to classical sources, the Glossary cites readily available authors where possible; for example Herodotus and Strabo are prominent in the Glossary, although one would not be surprised to find that much of Tasso’s geographical-historical learning comes from some intermediate source. In general, both the Notes and the Glossary aspire only to be explanatory; thus, for example, the Glossary cannot be approached as an index of place names, since there can be no reason to explain such names as England, Ireland, and France.

I have borrowed from the practise of some Elizabethan printers the device of marginal quotation marks to signal sententious passages. The sentence—a short, pithy statement of a general moral or psychological truth—was much valued by readers and writers in Tasso’s century, and considered especially characteristic of tragic and heroic poetry. Hence I have made an effort to identify those that appear in the Liberata, even at the risk of appearing quaint.

The text for this translation is from the UTET series: Opere di Torquato Tasso, a cura di Bortolo Tommaso Sozzi, Volume Primo (Turin, 1966). I have frequently, though not invariably, followed Sozzi’s explanations of difficult passages; and I should mention here the usefulness, frequently, of the copious annotations in Lanfranco Caretti’s edition of Gerusalemme Liberata (Turin 1971). The text for my version of Tasso’s Allegory of the Poem is in Angelo Solerti’s edition of the Liberata (Florence, 1895), 2.25–30.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961). See especially 2:954–1073. See also Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), 390–96; and for translation of selected texts pertinent to the controversy, Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit, 1962), 243–503.

2. His Discorsi dell’Arte Poetica was perhaps begun as early as 1561, published in 1587, and expanded thereafter into the Discorsi del Poema Eroico (1594). See Discourses on the Heroic Poem, translated by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford, 1973), xi–xiii.

3. For a representative example of Tasso’s defense of the marvellous in poetry, see Discourses, tr. by Cavalchini and Samuel, 35–39.

4. As would be expected of him, Tasso also acknowledges here and there the work of Dante and Petrarch, and other fellow Italians, usually by echoing an image or turn of phrase. The entire subject of the Renaissance poet’s imitations of his predecessors, both classical and vernacular, is intricate and difficult to discuss. Interested readers may begin by consulting Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven, 1982); and for Graeco-Roman theory on literary imitation as related to the emulative spirit (pp. xii–xv above), still useful is H. O. White, Plagiarism and Imitation in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 3–30.

5. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, tr. Nash (Detroit, 1966), 103–105.

6. Readers interested in Tasso’s sources for this history may consult Tasso’s contemporary at Ferrara, Giovanni Battista Pigna, Historia de’ Principi d’Este … (Ferrara, 1570).

7. For theoretical reasons leading Tasso to write of true history, as well as for his thoughts on blending the verisimilar and the marvellous, see especially the second book of his Discourses, tr. Cavalchini and Samuel, 21–56.

8. Letter to Scipione Gonzaga, cited in C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso (Cambridge, 1965), 100.

9. For Spenser, see primarily E. Koeppel, Die englischen TassoÜbersetzungen des xvi. Jahrhunderts, in Anglia, vol. 11 (1889), 11–38, 333–62; vol. 12 (1889), 103–42. See also H. H. Blanchard, "Imitations from Tasso in the Faerie Queene," Studies in Philology XXII (1925), 198–204.

10. Most notably in the reference to a time when "I of warres and bloudy Mars do sing, And Briton fields with Sarazin bloud bedyde" (F.Q. 1.11.7).

11. E.g., 1.3.31; 1.5.13–15; 1.7.31; 2.3.40, etc. Professor Blanchard has noted that for the example singled out here (F.Q. 1.10.62–64) the general context in Spenser is more reminiscent of Tasso’s Rinaldo than of the context in the Liberata (see the Variorum Spenser, 2.289).

12. C. P. Brand, Tasso, 228–32.

13. Sufficient on the few points of direct contact is Ewald Pommrich, Miltons Verhältnis zu Tasso (Halle, 1902). A more subtle discussion of kinship between Tasso’s poetry and Milton’s is skillfully conducted by Judith A. Kates, Tasso and Milton: the Problem of Christian Epic (Lewisburg, 1983).

14. For structural parallelism in Spenser, see Ernest A. Strathmann’s abstract in the Spenser Variorum, 2.467–71; and also A. C. Hamilton, "‘Like Race to Runne’: The parallel Structure of The Faerie Queene, Books I and II," PMLA 73 (1958), 327–34. For Milton’s parallels and contrasts between Hell and Heaven in P.L. I–III, see especially A. S. P. Woodhouse, The Heavenly Muse (Toronto, 1972), where the emphasis on Homeric and Virgilian patterning provides a useful augmentation to this more limited suggestion about Tasso’s contribution.

15. For parallels and contrasts in characters, see R. Nash, "The Role of Erminia in the Gerusalemme Liberata," in Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, vol. XLIII (1958), 322–23. And for some thematic motifs in the Liberata, see R. Nash, "Chivalric Themes in Samson Agonistes," in Studies in Honor of John Wilcox, ed. Ross and Wallace (Detroit, 1958), 23–25.

16. I have occasionally risked oddity by retaining a few Latinisms without annotation—e.g., interpose delay (1.16; 6.90; et al.), Fame is (see Glossary), etc. Some ears will be offended by the mildly Latinate use of serene as a substantive, although Shelley, for example, seems quite fond of it. By far