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Title: Godfrey of Bulliogre: A Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax's Translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, Together With Fairfax's Original Poems by Torquato Tasso, Kathleen Lea, Edward Fairfax, T. M. Gang ISBN: 0-19-812480-5 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $155.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Better than Tasso?
Comment: There were two great ages of English translation: the Elizabethan period, and the last 30 years.

After the Elizabethans we had the Augustans, who suffered from straitness of form (Homer in heroic couplets? No, his River of verse won't fit into that series of Beakers of verse, though Pope's are the very Best heroic couplets), or the Victorians, who offered us either the faded roses of Augustan couplets, or of Romantic lyricism; and on top of that they bowdlerised. Aristophanes never made a dirty joke, according to his Victorian translators, and even when reading a relatively chaste author like Tasso, in Victorian guise you know that at least half of the human condition won't be there, regardless of what Tasso actually wrote.

You'll notice I've skipped an age. Yes, the Romantics were also great translators, but they translated only what they needed. Byron gives us one canto of Italian epic; Shelley gives us one Euripedes play, and segments of Dante or Goethe; neither settle down for the drudgery of translating an entire epic. (Except in the sense that Byron's _Don Juan_ is a version of Ariosto, just as the poem Christopher Logue wrote called the _Illiad_ is a version of Homer without being truly a translation.

The Elizabethans had the fire and the patience, and they had no need to lie to their readers as the Victorians had. Their freedoms, as those that Fairfax took, are justified by their immersion in the spirit of the poems they English'd.

And the greatest Elizabethan translations are... Well, Marlowe, obviously: Marlowe's incandescent version of Book 1 of Lucan's _Pharsalia_, and his versions of Ovid's _Amores_. But other than Marlowe, the great Elizabethan translation is by Edward Fairfax, his version of _Gerusalemma Liberata_.

This is one of the great English translations, counting Barbara Reynolds' _Orlando Furioso_ and Dryden's _Aeniad_. Fairfax gives us Tasso's seriousness, his occasional humour, and also (surely as much a model for Spencer's _Faerie Queen_ as Tasso's own Italian text was) Tasso's erotic sensibility. Ariosto's eroticism was frankly acknowleged, part of the life of any sane Paladin, while the sexiness in Tasso is vested in the supposedly "bad" characters, like Alcina: and thus both more powerful and more sexy.

An outstanding feature of Fairfax's astonishing translation is his concision; he finds himself time and again with spare room in his English ottava rima, which gaps he tends to fill with new similes, alliterative examples and poetic diadems, suggested by Tasso but not quite found there. Where most translators who attempt to use the same form as their model struggle to keep up, Fairfax is in such control that he has resources (and syllables) to spare. His use of those syllables gives us a kind of improvement on Tasso. (I have heard Italians say this, so I'm prepared to let it stand.) That is, there is actually more in Fairfax, stanza by stanza and Canto by Canto, than there is in Tasso. Where Tasso lists two examples, for instance, Fairfax lists three. His invention is never independent of Tasso's text, but rather decorates the original text without holding up the speedy flow of the action. We would censure this freedom in a later translation, but Fairfax's other advantage is that he is an Elizabethan. His freedom is in keeping with Tasso's own adaptations of earlier poets, and of Fairfax's own day.

But I have followed Fairfax with Tasso in Italian and a crib, and I can report that his occasional small freedoms are never in contravention of the sense of Tasso's poetic flow, but always in its service.

As well as giving us great and accurate poetry, Fairfax follows Tasso's form, presenting us with a stanza for stanza translation, eight lines of ABABABCC ottava rima for eight lines of ABABABCC ottava rima. In doing so (and in his extreme mastery of that form) Fairfax lit a fuse that travelled underground in English before exploding in Byron, and again in Reynolds' unexcelled Ariosto translation.

There are other Tasso translations, but only one, ever in the history of Englsh poetic translation, that captures Tasso's mix of lightness and earnestness, and above all Tasso's febrile religious sensuality. This is one of the three or four truly great English translations. I recommend it above any other version of Tasso. Great poem; the greatest (in English) in this version.

Cheers!

Laon