Torquato Tasso e Francesco Patrizi: tra polemiche letterarie e incontri intellettuali. Micaela Rinaldi
Aminta's famous unfolding of how he fell in love — "A poco a poco nacque nel mio petto, / non so da qual radice, / com'erba suol che per se stessa germini, / un incognito affetto / che mi fea desiare d'essere sempre presente / a la mia bella Silvia" (1.2.87-93) — is captured with a similarly alliterative and felicitous opening line and then sustained by parallel grammatical construction in the English translation: "And bit by bit was born within my breast, / 1 don't know from what root, / as grass may seem to germinate itself, / a strange affection that / made me desire to be / forever present where / my lovely Silvia was." Finally, Dafne's soulful lament (note how the repeated o's in the plaintive second verse in Italian echo the initial exclamatory "O" [my emphasis]) — "O Silvia, Silvia, tu non sai ne credi / quanto '1 foco d'amor possa in un petto" (4.1.66-67) — becomes only slightly less poetic in this translation and aptly mirrors the imagery: "O Silvia, you neither think nor know / how in one's breast the fire of love can burn." In fine, Professors Jernigan and Jones are to be complimented for their laudable attention to poetic nuances or how the poem means, to paraphrase "the master of those who know" (in this case, translator-poet John Ciardi). This reviewer's only disappointment, in fact, derived from the translation's overly-modest scholarly apparatus. While the translators' scholarship includes, in addition to cursory introductory comments, a biographical chronology, a selected bibliography, and five pages of clarifying notes, most readers would likely welcome expanded glosses that detail Tasso's complex poetics and decipher the Ferrarese court's complicated politics. MADISON U. SOWELL Brigham Young University