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Sunday, March 02, 2008
Hail, Zerbin!
[The story so far. The beautiful princess Angelica has been captured by pirates from ‘Ebuda’—which is to say, the Hebrides—where she is to be sacrificed to a hideous sea monster by the natives in order to appease the sea god Proteus. That’s her, above, according to Gustave Doré [note: originally I posted Doré’s Andromeda by mistake; but that image above is definitely from Doré’s illustrations to Ariosto. Dig that hippogriff! Indeed, if you’ve a moment, check out a whole splendid series of Doréan Ariosto on Wikimedia Commons]. Meanwhile her paramour, the brave Sir Orlando, Charlemagne’s greatest knight, searches Europe for her in vain. In other news, Sir Ruggiero, who has battled monsters and enchantresses on Alcina’s isle, finally escapes on the back on the flying hippogriff. Now read on.]
I’ve been reading through Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and it is simply splendid. There are a thousand things to love about it; but, for today, I want to touch briefly on Canto X, to note a couple of things. First, there is the fact that Ruggiero, given the chance to escape the sorceress’s island and return to Europe to take his place in the great war for civilisation between Christendom and Islam that is the structuring principle for the poem as a whole, instead elects to waste many weeks as a tourist. He has a hippogriff, after all. You don’t get the use of one of those everyday. ‘He left Spain behind and made a direct line for India … he was disposed to see other lands than those where Aeolus incites the winds:’
On his journey he saw Cathay to one side and to the other Mangiana, as he passed over great Quinsai. He flew over the Himavian range, and skirted Sericana to his right. From the hyperborean land of the Scythians he turns towards the Hyrcanian sea and reached Samartia. … For all his pressing desire to return to Bradamant [his lover], Ruggiero was unwilling to forgo the pleasure of discovering the world. [10:69-71; Guido Waldmann’s translation]
‘For all his pressing desire to return to Bradamant…’ Yeah, right. Then, in case we were tempted to think the knight some kind of explorer, or even a common traveller, instead of a proper tourist, Ariosto tucks the following stanza into his narrative:
You must not imagine, my Lord, that he was constantly on the wing; every evening he put up at some hostelry, avoiding poor accommodation as best he could. Days and months went as he pursued his way, so eager was he to visit lands and seas. Then, arriving one morning at London, the hippogriff swooped down over London. [10:73]
‘Avoiding poor accommodation as best he could’ ... isn’t that a simply spiffing little aside? The ‘my Lord’ here is Ariosto’s patron, the head of the d’Este family of Ferrara. According to legend brave sir Ruggiero and the female Christian knight Bradamant were the ancestors of his house; so you can see Ariosto trying to balance the idea that, naturally, Ruggiero is eager to reunite with Bradamant and get on with the important business of giving birth to the d’Este line; whilst not losing sight of the equally important consideration that he’s enough of a gentleman not to miss the chance of a bit of overseas sightseeing from the Hyperborean land of the Scythians to the Hyrcanian sea. And enough of a gentleman not to put up with inferior hotel service whilst doing so
Two more brief things to note. In London Ruggiero watches a parade of all the noblemen of England, amongst them such luminaries as ‘Raimondo, count of Devon’, ‘Count Ottonlei’, ‘Odoardo the count of Croisberia’, wherever that is, and ‘Emrigo count of Sarisberia’. That last is a placename you can stare at for a long time until, magic-eye-like, the name Salisbury finally emerges. (Professsor Guglielmo Zappacosta, who provides the notes for the Bietti standard Italian-language edition of Ariosto [1969], glosses all these wayward stabs at English placenames with some bang-up-to-the-minute wayward stabs of his own, amongst them such celebrated present-day English locations as ‘War Wick’, ‘Glocester’ ‘Barkeley’, and ‘Hanton’, which in turn rather suggests that today’s Italian scholars feel no need to be too precise about a subject so arcane as English geography). Then Ruggiero is told to look behind the file of Englishmen ‘and you will see thirty-thousand Scotsmen lead by Zerbin, their king’s son’ [10:83].
Just to be clear: the Prince of Scotland is called Zerbin. Least. Scottish. Name. Ever.
Then Ruggiero decides he wants to look at Ireland, so he flies there. Finally he decides to fly to France, where the war is; which, really, is where he should have gone in the first place. So he flies south from Ireland towards Brittany (‘after this he turned his steed south towards the sea that washes the Breton coast’, 10:92); and whilst in transit he happens to glance down: ‘looking down he espied Angelica chained to the bare rock’. So, once again, to be clear: flying south-south-east from Ireland towards Brittany Ruggiero happens to notice Angelica chained to a rock on an island off the Scottish coast. Barbara Reynolds [p.765] puts the matter in a nicely understated way: ‘it is not clear how Ruggiero, heading for Brittany from Ireland, could see Angelica chained to a rock on the Hebrides.’ Not clear. No.
The temptation is, perhaps, to want to have another look at ‘Ebuda’ and wrench the narrative back into a semblance of sense. Perhaps Ariosto means these to be the Scilly Isles? But no. For one thing in Canto 8, where the scene is set on continental Europe, the islands are specifically located ‘in the northern seas, over towards the setting sun, out beyond Ireland’. ‘Ebuda’ bears the same relationship to ‘Hebrides’ that ‘Varvecia’ does to ‘War Wick’, or Nortfozia’ does to ‘Norfolk’. More than this, Ebuda presumably means ‘group of seven islands’, which is why the Hebrides (Barra, Berneray, Harris, Lewis, North Uist, South Uist, and St Kilda) are so called by sassenachs (Gaelic speakers call them Innse Gall). The Scilly Isles are six. No; it’s not that Ariosto is directing our attention to the Scilly Isles. It’s that he is, ostentatiously, informing us that he doesn’t give a stuff about ‘accuracy’, ‘verisimilitude’ or ‘consistency’. That’s the glory of his poem.
It’s a good job that Ruggiero’s eyesight is as good as it is too; for Angelica at any rate. With the help of his lance, and a magic shield he happened to pick up, he whacks the monster and rescues Angelica. Then he falls in love with her, thereby jeopardising the lineage of the d’Este family and crossing Orlando, whose inamorata she is. But that’s a whole other story. Canto 11, indeed. More later.
[STOP PRESS!! I’ve just reached Canto 24 in which ... woe, alas, ai-ai ... Zerbin dies! He fights the Tartar Mandricard, is wounded and dies in the arms of the beautiful Isabel. To her he says ‘love me still after I am dead,’ to which she replies:
‘Do not imagine, my love, that you shall make this last journey without me. Never fear: I mean to follow you, to heaven or to hell. Our two spirits must set forth together, and stay together in eternity. The moment I see you close your eyes my grief will finish me; if it cannot do so, I promise you with this sword I shall today pierce my breast. My hope is that our bodies will fare better dead than ever they did alive.’ [24:81]
Not much chance of that, I’d say, what with putrefaction and everything. But a nice thought. Zerbin talks her out of suicide, although she’s pretty distraught. Then, curious as to what happens to her, I checked the Annotated Index at the back of Waldman’s translation, only to read the following:
Isabel ... 24.47. Witnesses Zerbin’s duel with Mandricard over the sword Durindana; 24.71 Intercedes with Doralice to suspend duel, but Zerbin dies of wounds; 24.86 With a hermit’s help she takes Zerbin’s body to Provence; 28.95 is courted by Rodomont; 29.3 eldues Rodomont by having him kill her.
That’s one way of eluding an unwanted suitor, I suppose.]
Comments
Except for lit majors who have taken a Spenser course, I don’t think very many Americans have any knowledge of Ariosto. Since Orlando Furioso is tons of fun, that’s a shame. Does anybody know how familiar modern Italians are with the poem? Some of the staging of fights in spaghetti Westerns is reminiscent of the set pieces in Ariosto, especially the triangular gun fight at the end of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—the way that the action in that movie is embedded in the American Civil War also reminds me of the way that the war between the Saracens and the Christians frames Orlando. Would an educated Italian pick up on these vibes too?
Adam,
I don’t know quite what to make of Orlando’s geographical wishful thinking; I’d have to know more about the poem to determine whether inaccuracy is part of the game. I’m intrigued by your assertion that it is.
In any case, I am working on novels of odyssey, and I’m struck by the fact that here too there is an erotic component to distraction and delay. Just as, try as he might to escape to Ithaca, Odysseus is forced to live as captive to a beautiful nymph, so here Ruggiero starts out exploring the world and ends up beginning a dalliance both exciting and potentially destructive. Writers as diverse as Derrida and Hogarth (yes, that Hogarth) have taken up this theme in the more abstract sense: the curve, the detour, the voluptuousness of being wayward.
You may be right about Zerbin, but recall, if you will, that Donizetti’s opera, Lucia di Lammermoor includes the Scottish Laird of Ravenswood, Edgardo, not to mention those other Scottish characters Enrico and Raimondo.
Isn’t that painting Gustave Doré’s Andromeda?
It is indeed--http://www.illusionsgallery.com/Andromeda-Dore.html
Ahmad and Richard, you’re both absolutely right. Thanks for pointing out my error: I’ve changed the picture.
Grackle: splendid, again. Part of me, irrationally, thinks Italians ought to be better at Scottish names than other nations, on account of the famous elective affinity between the two nations. I lived four years in Aberdeen, and the city is full of Italians, many of them selling ice cream; the same is true of Glasgow and Edinburgh. And on the other hand, whilst Enrico and Raimondo aren’t very Scottish names, at least we can agree that Henry and Ray are. But into what does one parse Zerbin? I don’t know.
Ditto: Croisberia. Where? Professor Zappacosta suggests ‘Shrewsbury’, which doesn’t wholly convince me.
If a creative geographical inexactitude is part of the game in Orlando, could we not also suggest that the appellation Zerbin is an example of some kind of mischievous anthroponymy on the part Ariosto?
If a creative geographical inexactitude is part of the game in Orlando, could we not also suggest that the appellation Zerbin is an example of some kind of mischievous anthroponymy on the part of Ariosto?
Random thoughts:
Tourism is the erotics of travel. Zygmunt Bauman has written of two postmodern types: the tourist and the vagabond. Both are pulled to travel by the tides of globalization; the former rides the waves while the latter treads water or drowns.
My dissertation has a chapter on Bharati Mukherjee’s *Holder of the World* that analyzes the novel’s interest in the shift from forced migration to erotically charged travel. (*Jasmine* has the same theme.)
Moretti’s *World Epic* has some interesting writing on *Faust* and that work’s attempt to contain the world through Faust’s travels. Sounds like Goethe modeled these travels on Ruggiero’s.