Volume 48, Number 8 · May 17, 2001
Liberating a Masterpiece
By Bernard Knox
Jerusalem Delivered (Gerusalemme liberata)
Torquato Tasso, edited and translated from the Italian by Anthony M. Esolen
Johns Hopkins University Press, 491 pp., $65.00; $22.50 (paper)
A first taste of Tasso's great poem, completed in 1575, suggests that it is an exotic literary cocktail composed in Italian of equal portions of Spenser's Faerie Queene and Homer's Iliad, with a generous splash of Virgil's Aeneid and a soupçon of Milton's Paradise Lost. Partly an epic of the exploits of Godfrey of Bouillon, commander of the First Crusade, it does in fact draw heavily on the Iliad and the Aeneid: Erminia, on the walls of Jerusalem, identifies the enemy commanders as Helen did for Priam at Troy, and Tasso's opening line—Canto l'arme pietose e 'l capitano (I sing the reverent armies and their chief)—is a clear echo of Virgil's Arma virumque cano (I sing of arms and the man), while pietose reminds us of Virgil's pius Aeneas, the model for Tasso's hero Godfrey, who is frequently described as pio. Spenser's sorceresses, enchanted islands, and wandering knights are borrowed from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, published in 1516, which was Tasso's source for the same material, and Milton, for his council of Satan and the fallen angels, drew on Tasso's fifth Canto, in which Beelzebub and the devils of Hell plan an attack on the Crusaders.
Review, 3259 words
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