Calvino's Ariosto's Orlando: Selection, Omission, Praise, Paraphrase

"Orlando furioso" di Ludovico Ariosto, raccontato da Italo Calvino—con una scelta del poema (hereafter Orlando raccontato) is a brilliant encounter of two great and kindred Italian writers; they are also two of my favorites and among those I have most often taught. Italo Calvino's abridging and anthologizing strategy in this volume corresponds roughly to that which I have used in the past to reduce Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso to a dose feasible for students in the United States at the intermediate to advanced levels of Italian language acquisition—though there is intriguingly little overlap between the passages Calvino chooses to feature and those which I have focused on in past teaching (to which I will return later).

To propose that Calvino nursed a profound admiration for Ariosto is no novelty. His trilogia araldica—Il visconte dimezzato (1952), Il barone rampante (1957) and Il cavaliere inesistente (1959), later published together as I nostri antenati—would be unimaginable without the Ariostean subtext. Already his more conventionally neorealist production, [End Page S-332] as early as Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), was credited by no less a critic than Cesare Pavese with a "sapore ariostesco."² Cinzia Cupersito's 2008 thesis at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia at the Università degli Studi di Salerno, "Presenze di Ludovico Ariosto nella narrativa di Italo Calvino," explores the underlying influence of Ariosto in many of Calvino's works throughout his career, though it does not directly address Orlando raccontato.³ In Calvino's Il castello dei destini incrociati (1973), Orlando and Astolfo figure in one of the interlocked tales of the tarot and in Perché leggere i classici? (1991) the author dedicates two complete essays to the Furioso: "La struttura dell'«Orlando»" and "Piccola antologia di ottave." At the very end of his career Calvino yet again tips his hat to Ariosto in passing, by citing Astolfo's voyage to the Moon as an example of leggerezza in his Lezioni americane (1993).

When Calvino turns explicitly to articulating his admiration for Ariosto in Orlando raccontato, the juxtaposition of two master wordsmiths makes for a thought-provoking and entertaining book. He starts with a very skillful "Presentazione" in which he recapitulates the literary tradition of epic romance within which Ariosto wrote, with some background on his historical context. He then summarizes and comments upon the entire vast poem in twenty-two witty chapters into which he embeds passages of Ariosto's original, also providing copious endnotes. While Calvino's admiration of Ariosto is apparent in every line of his book, both his summary and his commentary comprise some conspicuous and charged omissions, revealing perhaps a cryptic and deftly managed anxiety of influence.⁴ Simply put, Calvino concentrates his comments on details of Ariosto's stylistic technique and verbal artistry, while ducking many of his most transgressive ideological suggestions and his broader and bolder structural methods.

Clearly enamored of Ariosto's extraordinarily suggestive imagery and quicksilver versification, Calvino can nevertheless be said to have foregrounded his own style more than Ariosto did. In Ariosto's work, every hendecasyllable of which flows with an assured inevitability, a paradoxically low number of individual verses sticks in the memory. This contrasts starkly with the way most well educated Italians have by heart at least a dozen lines of the Commedia to ventilate in public. With [End Page S-333] Ariosto, instead, one recalls countless incidents, situations, tones and characters but relatively few specific verses. Two exceptions, both from the very first of the forty-six cantos of the poem, are the aphoristic verses "ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra" (OF 1.7—"Behold how often human judgement goes astray"—all translations mine) and "Oh gran bontà de' cavallieri antiqui!" (OF 1.22—"Oh, the great goodness of the knights of old!"); Calvino himself mentions the notoriety of these two verses in his "Presentazione."⁵ Ariosto's verse is always expert and graceful but his stylistic priority is always clarity rather than beauty: an excessively striking verse risks calling attention to itself and interrupting the author's communication of both plot...