The liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata)

491 Pages·2009·1.179 MB·English, Italian

by  of Bouillon Godfrey, of Bouillon Godfrey, Tasso, Torquato, Wickert, Max

oxford world’s classics
THE LIBERATION OF JERUSALEM
Torquato Tasso (1544 – 95), born at Sorrento, son of the
Bergamasque courtier-poet Bernardo Tasso, spent his youth wan-
dering in the wake of his father’s troubled career. At the age of 18,
while still a student at Padua, he published Rinaldo, a chivalric epic
in his father’s manner. In 1565 he entered the service of the power-
ful Este court at Ferrara, where he composed his masterpiece,
The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata, 1581). His pas-
toral drama Aminta (1573) had meanwhile assured his fame, but
soon his paranoid temperament goaded him into outbursts that
caused his seven-year confinement in a hospital for the insane. After
his release and a series of renewed wanderings, he settled in Rome.
He devoted his final years to religious works, including a wholly
rewritten version of his epic, The Conquest of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme
conquistata, 1593), which had little success. Tasso also composed
a verse tragedy, Torrismondo; some charming prose dialogues and
letters; several significant critical essays; and the most impressive
body of Italian lyric since Petrarch. The Liberation of Jerusalem was
quickly translated into many European languages. For centuries it
exerted a profound influence on writers (including Spenser, Lope
de Vega, Milton, Corneille, Voltaire, Goethe, and Byron), artists
(including Tintoretto, the Carracci, Guercino, Pietro da Cortona,
Domenichino, Van Dyck, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Tiepolo,
Fragonard, and Delacroix), and composers (including Monteverdi,
Lully, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Rossini, and Dvorˇák).
Max Wickert, born in Augsburg (Germany) and educated at
Yale University and the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, has for
many years been a member of the Department of English in the
State University at Buffalo, New York. He is the author of two col-
lections of poems, All the Weight of the Still Midnight and Pat Sonnets,
and of critical articles on Spenser and early opera. He is currently
preparing the first English translation of Andrea da Barberino’s
Reali di Francia.
Mark Davie has taught Italian at the Universities of Liverpool
and Exeter, and has published studies on various aspects of Italian
literature, mainly in the period from Dante to the Renaissance; he is
particularly interested in the relations between vernacular and
humanistic culture, and between religious and humorous writing, in
Italy in the Renaissance. He is the Italian Editor of Modern Language
Review.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
TORQUATO TASSO
The Liberation of
Jerusalem
(Gerusalemme liberata)
Translated by
MAX WICKERT
With an Introduction and Notes by
MARK DAVIE
1
1
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Translation, Chronology, Appendix, and Glossary © Max Wickert 2009
Introduction, Select Bibliography, and Explanatory Notes © Mark Davie 2009
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tasso, Torquato, 1544-1595.
[Gerusalemme liberata. English]
The liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata) / Torquato Tasso ;
translated by Max Wickert ; with an introduction and notes by Mark Davie.
p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–953535–4 (alk. paper)
1. Jerusalem—History—Latin Kingdom, 1099-1244—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry,
Italian—Translations into English. 3. Godfrey, of Bouillon, ca. 1060-1100—Poetry.
4. Crusades, First, 1096-1099—Poetry. I. Wickert, Max. II. Title.
PQ4642.E21W53 2009
851'.4—dc22
2008039121
T ypeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
ISBN 978–0–19–953535–4
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
A Note on the Translation xxviii
Select Bibliography xxx
A Chronology of Torquato Tasso xxxiii
THE LIBERATION OF JERUSALEM
Canto One 3
Canto Two 22
Canto Three 42
Canto Four 58
Canto Five 78
Canto Six 97
Canto Seven 120
Canto Eight 145
Canto Nine 163
Canto Ten 183
Canto Eleven 199
Canto Twelve 217
Canto Thirteen 239
Canto Fourteen 256
Canto Fifteen 272
Canto Sixteen 286
Canto Seventeen 302
Canto Eighteen 322
Canto Nineteen 344
Canto Twenty 371
Appendix:Tasso’sLiberation of Jerusalem in
Literature, Art, and Music 400
Explanatory Notes 404
Glossary of Proper Names 435
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INTRODUCTION
First impressions
Areader who opens The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata)
and reads the first few stanzas will pick up several divergent clues to
the poem which they introduce. The opening lines stake its claim to be
an epic poem, placing it in a tradition going back at least to Virgil’s
Aeneid, whose opening words, ‘Arms and the man I sing . . .’, they echo.
They specify its subject matter, the ‘holy war’ which ‘freed’ the site of the
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as an object of Christian pilgrimage —
the first, that is, of the European military campaigns in Palestine
known as the Crusades, which culminated in the capture of Jerusalem
in July 1099. And they leave no doubt that the poem will present this
not just as a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which Asia and Libya (the latter
a generic term for Africa) fight against the crusaders, but as a war
extending even to Heaven and Hell. Yet if this suggests a stark, sim-
plistic account of a battle between good and evil, the first stanza ends
with a suggestion that things may not be quite so simple: the ‘Captain’
of the crusaders, Godfrey of Bouillon, had to deal not only with the
alien occupiers of Jerusalem but also with ‘errant’ knights on his own
side — opening up the possibility that the poem might deal not just
with the crusade itself but also with whatever distractions kept the
crusaders from their primary task.
The same ambivalent notes continue in the next two stanzas. Stanza 2
begins with another standard piece of epic convention, the poet’s
appeal to his Muse to give him inspiration to match his lofty theme —
but then the stanza ends by acknowledging that he may not always fol-
low the Muse’s guidance, but will sometimes ‘embroider the truth’
and embellish it with ‘pleasures other than your own’. The mere hint
is enough to provoke a marked change of register in stanza 3, with a
rash of words elaborating the theme of pleasure — ‘flattering sweets’,
‘delight’, ‘charming’, ‘mellifluous verse’ — and the stanza ends, via the
familiar metaphor of a nurse making bitter medicine palatable by sug-
aring the rim of the cup, with a positive endorsement, not of truth but
of deception: ‘So stealth | restores him, and delusion gives him health.’
Already we seem to have come a long way from the sternly historical
theme announced in the first few lines, so it may not be too surprising
when in stanza 4 another routine poetic procedure — the dedication of
the work to the poet’s patron — proves to be not entirely straightfor-
ward. Tasso thanks Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, at whose court he
viii introduction
lived between 1567 and 1576, not just for employing him but for taking
him in as an ‘errant pilgrim, battered to and fro | by waves and rocks
that made my spoil their sport’. Not just errant knights, then, but an
errant poet to write about them. And even the dedication of the poem
is qualified, for stanza 4 ends not by offering the poem which he has
already written, but by suggesting that he might one day write another:
Perhaps one day my prescient pen will try
boldly to write what now mere hints imply.
Stanza 5 spells out what Tasso has in mind: to encourage Alfonso to
renew the crusade against ‘the fierce Thracian’ — the Turks — in his
own time. So his choice of the First Crusade as his theme is not fortuit-
ous; Tasso expects his patron and his readers to relate it to the con-
cerns of his own day, when the expanding Turkish empire posed an
ever-present threat to western Europe, especially to Italy, whose coasts
were always vulnerable to attack from marauding Turkish ships.
As for the twenty-first-century reader, these first five stanzas will
probably provoke several conflicting reactions. The Crusades are not
an episode in European history which we are much inclined to cele-
brate, and the crusading ethos is one which we have come to view with
suspicion, so we are unlikely to want to read the poem for the sake of
its declared subject-matter. But even from these few stanzas it is clear
that Tasso’s poem is not the unquestioning celebration of ‘holy war’
which its title might imply, but something much more complex. These
stanzas also raise most of the issues which we need to confront if we
are to understand and appreciate Tasso’s poem, and they can provide
a convenient framework for a brief discussion of each of these issues
here. Hopefully they will also have sufficiently intrigued us to persuade
us that it is worth making the effort.1
Tasso and the First Crusade
In a letter to his friend Orazio Capponi, Tasso wrote explaining
how he had used his historical material in his poem: ‘In the first three
cantos I follow history, not just in the overall outline of events but in
every circumstance, not varying or adding anything, apart from a few
additions about Clorinda and Erminia. Then, having laid this founda-
tion of truth, [from canto 4 onwards] I start to mingle what is true with
what is invented but plausible.’ Tasso’s main historical source was the
twelfth-century Chronicle of William of Tyre, one of the most widely
1 These ‘figures of conflict’ in the opening stanzas have been pointed out by Sergio
Zatti; see his The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press,2006).
introduction ix
read accounts of the crusade in the Middle Ages, of which an Italian
translation was printed in Venice in 1562 (although Tasso could also
have read it in Latin). In canto 1 he gives an account of the crusaders’
situation at the beginning of 1099, based on William of Tyre, which is
broadly factual, although he admits to having, as he put it, ‘enlarged
the truth’ by exaggerating the length of time they had already been on
campaign.
The army which had assembled piecemeal in Constantinople in
response to Pope Urban II’s preaching of the crusade in 1095 finally
crossed the Bosphorus into Asia Minor in the spring of 1097, and
gained its first military success by capturing the Turkish capital of
Nicea, about 90 miles south-east of Constantinople, in June. Between
June and October the crusaders crossed the Anatolian plateau and
reached Antioch, a few miles inland from the Mediterranean on the
modern border between Turkey and Syria, in late October. They laid
siege to the city, which held out through the winter of 1097 – 8. The
deadlock was eventually broken the following June, when a disaffected
Armenian official who commanded one of the watch-towers in the
Turkish-ruled city made contact with Bohemond, one of the crusader
leaders, and agreed to allow Bohemond’s men to scale the walls and
open the gates. The crusaders occupied the city, only to find them-
selves almost immediately defending it against an army which the
Turkish governor of Mosul, several hundred miles inland, had brought
to the aid of his colleague in Antioch. The crusaders successfully
repulsed the attack, but their battle-weariness after the long siege,
combined with disagreements among themselves about who should
govern the newly conquered territory around the city, meant that
they spent the rest of 1098 in frustrating inactivity. Finally, at the end
of the year, Count Raymond of Toulouse undertook to lead the cru-
sade on to Jerusalem. Of the other leaders, Robert of Normandy and
Tancred joined him immediately, with Godfrey of Bouillon and
Robert of Flanders following about a month later, and in the early
months of 1099 the army slowly made its way south towards Jerusalem.
Two of the most prominent leaders of the early stages of the campaign
stayed behind, taking the opportunity to establish personal states for
themselves in places they had already occupied: Bohemond in Antioch,
where his leading role in the siege had given him an unchallengeable
position; and Godfrey’s ambitious younger brother Baldwin in Edessa,
an Armenian Christian state some 150 miles to the east, which he had
conquered by absenting himself from the siege of Antioch in the early
months of 1098.
This is recognizably the factual basis for the situation which Tasso
describes in the first canto of his poem. Stanza 6 summarizes ‘the story