More accurate is not necessarily better, nor more truthful

[larryhammer]

Here's a modern, fairly literal translation of Jerusalem Delivered IV.31, describing Armida and her effect on the knights of the First Crusade:

Her shapely breasts showed the uncovered snow
that stirs and nourishes the fire of love.
They looked, in part, like fruit not fully ripe,
part sheltered by her gown that lay above,
envious--yet if it shuts the pass for sight,
imagination, you have room to rove,
for not content with outward beauty, deep
among the hidden secrets would you keep. (Esolan, 2000)

Four centuries earlier, this looser version was published:

Her breasts, two hills o'erspread with purest snow,
   Sweet, smooth and supple, soft and gently swelling,
Between them lies a milken dale below,
   Where love, youth, gladness, whiteness make their dwelling;
Her breasts half hid, and half were laid to show;
   Her envious vesture greedy sight repelling:
So was the wanton clad, as if this much
Should please the eye, the rest, unseen, the touch. (Fairfax, 1600)

Fairfax notoriously padded out his stanzas with redundancies, and added classical mythologizing that Tasso had rejected as alien to a Christian epic. But there's reasons some of the great Elizabethan translations live on. They had poetry.

---L.

Comments

[galeni.livejournal.com]

The second one is poetic and arouses the passions. The first is so distant, so clinical. Thank you for the second!

[larryhammer]

Exactly.

Also, the second not only shows us not only that she's a babe, but that she knows a thing or three about seduction.

---L.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

Definitely!

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

You know, I probably would have liked the poem had we read Fairfax's translation instead of Esolen's in my Renaissance Epic course.

[larryhammer]

Curiously enough, I suspect this copy was used for a Renaissance Epic class, or something similar -- it's annotated with what looks suspiciously like lecture notes through book XVII (stopping at a dogeared page).

If you like The Faerie Queene, you should like Fairfax -- not only did he clearly learn something from Spencer, but Spencer learned things from Tasso. Possibly as much as he did from Ariosto.

---L.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

Gah, I still need to read Ariosto, too! Last time I saw my BA thesis adviser (several years ago) he scolded me for not having read it.

And yeah, I remember being glad I had read Tasso when I finally got around to reading the entire Faerie Queene. :)

[larryhammer]

Yes, you need to read Ariosto. Maybe you can use it as a reward for finishing your dissertation?

---L.

ObDigression

[larryhammer]

Why, I wonder, don't you have "head/desk OTP" listed as an LJ interest?

---L.

Re: ObDigression

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

One is only allowed so many interests... ;)

[larryhammer]

BTW, what did you read in that course?

---L.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

We read Jerusalem Delivered, as noted above, Camoes' Lusiads (which was REALLY BORING -- maybe it's better in Portuguese), and Paradise Lost. No Spenser, ostensibly because generically The Faerie Queene is more of a romance than an epic, but probably really because it's too long. The prof who taught the class was the resident Spenserian, oddly enough.

I also took a Medieval Epic course with the same prof -- that one was far more fun, though probably the fact that I was only auditing helped. In that one we read Beowulf, the Volsungasaga, the Chanson de Roland, Dante's Purgatorio, and the alliterative Morte Arthur and probably some other things I don't remember (I think there was at least one other saga).

[larryhammer]

Only three epics, the whole course? Huh.

I kinda liked the Luciads, though the three-book not-very-potted history of Portugal got a bit tedious. But then, I was watching how he Camoes bounced off Ariosto and Virgil -- and giggled like mad once I realized that the entire superstructure of pagan dieties had absolutely no effect on the story whatsoever. So incredibly Baroque, that, right down to the parody of Homer.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

...imagination, you have room to rove,
for not content with outward beauty, deep
among the hidden secrets would you keep. (Esolan, 2000)

There's hackneyed, and then there's cliché-chained and lamed to gimpiness. Esolan is trying to have it both ways: modern language with strategic archaicism when he bores himself into a corner.

[larryhammer]

He strains for his final couplets a lot. He also spends a lot of time in his introduction justifying using the form XAXAXABB with slants rhymes on the A's, which makes me suspect he's just not very good at rhyming.

Also, not very good with line breaks -- they're working against him, in this, rather than he's working against the breaks.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Don't miss this Guardian piece on rhyme (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1842433,00.html) which includes a summary of a catfight between Thomas Campion and the unfrotunately-named Samuel Daniel (who must have taken personally Campion's slagging of "tedious affectation" in rhyme).

[larryhammer]

The writer is right -- forms need to grown and continue.

BTW, angevin2 above has been posting transcriptions of Daniel's long historical poem, The Civil Wars, about the war of the Roses. For which I've been thanking her because there's no readily found modern editions of the thing.

---L.