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

[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.