- Translating Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso into English
Few works of literature better fit Walter Benjamin’s declaration that a literary work neither communicates nor imparts information than Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. “Messer Lodovico, dove mai avete trovato tante fanfaluche?,” Ippolito d’Este is purported to have asked the author, and it may be the first example of Ariosto’s irony in the poem when he describes his work as “not nothing” (“né che poco io vi dia,” 1.3).1
Whether Ariosto thought his poem meant nothing or something, to make something of it in translation, to comprehend translation as a form, Walter Benjamin says, we have to go back to the original to find “the issue of its translatability” (“On Translation” 253). I would agree and argue that a translator can only really bring one thing across the linguistic barrier, something that differs for each major author and work of genius. For Ariosto that one thing is an exact duplication of the form of the poem. John Harington’s translation leaves out too much. Barbara Reynolds catches the vibrancy but all too often [End Page 127] disappoints the expert who compares texts by adding her own brew.2 Guido Waldman deciphers the syntax but bores us. David Slavitt’s recent Harvard version tries to overgo Ariosto’s wit but doesn’t.3
But where there’s a will there’s a way. Maynard Mack’s “A Note on Translation” in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces says, “Literature is to be read, and the criticism that would destroy the reader’s power to make some form of contact with much of the world’s great writing must indeed be blown away” (2657). Mack makes the case that for short poems, a literal translation loses most of the poetry, and when a translator chooses to make his own poetry, he loses most or all of the author’s. Also, the fact of translation is that it “reflects the individuality of the language it is turned into, and the age will permeate it everywhere like yeast in dough” (2653). There are dangers lurking in every direction.
What makes the Furioso work, I am more and more convinced, is not vocabulary, or the plots Ariosto borrowed from Boiardo (very extensively, as Jo Ann Cavallo shows), and certainly not meaning and allegory, although they are there, but the experience of reading the line of verse itself, the sequencing of the syntax, the movement of caesuras, the rhythm of the lines.4 We know Ariosto worked on these details between the first and third editions. It is therefore worth considering just how to translate the Furioso with syntactic fidelity in mind as the paramount object. I’ve been trying for ten years to translate the Furioso, both in prose and by modifying Harington. I never got what I want. But I think I have it now, because English has a particular ability to duplicate Ariosto’s poem. There is an excitement to reading a translation that tracks the poet’s sentences, word choice, pauses, punctuation, metaphors, and even idioms as closely as possible.
Because the version I am thinking of doing depends on the ability of English to track Italian almost word for word, in my translation I try to introduce nothing, no equivalent metaphors, no doubling of words to fill out a line, and no attempts to duplicate sfumature no reader of English will notice. [End Page 128]
But this bare bones approach ignores the problem of tone, one of the most difficult things to talk about in poetry. One of Ariosto’s virtues, I would argue, is what I’ll call syntactic mood. The syntax is the instrument and the mood is like different notes or chords. Boiardo compares his stanzas to a collection of flowers (OI 3.5,1). Ariosto’s stanzas are arias. They may all have the same ottava rima structure, just as one brindisi of Verdi is similar to another, but they come in different keys. Or at least, at this point, that is my hypothesis. But what are the moods? It’s worth listening to a video clip in which Benjamin Sidoti argues that...