Calvino's Ariosto's Orlando: Selection, Omission, Praise, Paraphrase

Calvino's Ariosto's Orlando : Selection, Omission, Praise, Paraphrase John C. McLucas MLN, Volume 134 Supplement, September 2019, pp. S-332-S-344 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2019.0076 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743832 [ Access provided at 24 Oct 2020 07:48 GMT from UNSW Library ] Calvino’s Ariosto’s Orlando: Selection, Omission, Praise, Paraphrase ❦ John C. McLucas1 “Orlando furioso” di Ludovico Ariosto, raccontato da Italo Calvino—con una scelta del poema (hereafter Orlando raccontato) is a brilliant encounter of two great and kindred Italian writers; they are also two of my favorites and among those I have most often taught. Italo Calvino’s abridging and anthologizing strategy in this volume corresponds roughly to that which I have used in the past to reduce Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso to a dose feasible for students in the United States at the intermediate to advanced levels of Italian language acquisition—though there is intriguingly little overlap between the passages Calvino chooses to feature and those which I have focused on in past teaching (to which I will return later). To propose that Calvino nursed a profound admiration for Ariosto is no novelty. His trilogia araldica—Il visconte dimezzato (1952), Il barone rampante (1957) and Il cavaliere inesistente (1959), later published together as I nostri antenati—would be unimaginable without the Ariostean subtext. Already his more conventionally neorealist production, 1 I presented a preliminary version of this paper in April 2012 to the Cenacolo Baltimorense, an informal colloquium at which Italian Renaissance scholars from Baltimorearea institutions (including Johns Hopkins, Loyola University Maryland, Goucher, Towson University, the Walters Art Museum) meet once a semester to present work in progress. I would like to thank Cenacolo colleagues, including Pier Massimo Forni, whose comments have informed what follows. My earlier thoughts on this subject are in McLucas, “Dialogo.” See also Feinstein, Humility’s Deceit, which did not come to my attention in time for me to consult it for this paper. MLN 134S (2019): S-332–344 © 2019 by Johns Hopkins University Press M LN S-333 as early as Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), was credited by no less a critic than Cesare Pavese with a “sapore ariostesco.”2 Cinzia Cupersito’s 2008 thesis at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia at the Università degli Studi di Salerno, “Presenze di Ludovico Ariosto nella narrativa di Italo Calvino,” explores the underlying influence of Ariosto in many of Calvino’s works throughout his career, though it does not directly address Orlando raccontato.3 In Calvino’s Il castello dei destini incrociati (1973), Orlando and Astolfo figure in one of the interlocked tales of the tarot and in Perché leggere i classici? (1991) the author dedicates two complete essays to the Furioso: “La struttura dell’«Orlando»” and “Piccola antologia di ottave.” At the very end of his career Calvino yet again tips his hat to Ariosto in passing, by citing Astolfo’s voyage to the Moon as an example of leggerezza in his Lezioni americane (1993). When Calvino turns explicitly to articulating his admiration for Ariosto in Orlando raccontato, the juxtaposition of two master wordsmiths makes for a thought-provoking and entertaining book. He starts with a very skillful “Presentazione” in which he recapitulates the literary tradition of epic romance within which Ariosto wrote, with some background on his historical context. He then summarizes and comments upon the entire vast poem in twenty-two witty chapters into which he embeds passages of Ariosto’s original, also providing copious endnotes. While Calvino’s admiration of Ariosto is apparent in every line of his book, both his summary and his commentary comprise some conspicuous and charged omissions, revealing perhaps a cryptic and deftly managed anxiety of influence.4 Simply put, Calvino concentrates his comments on details of Ariosto’s stylistic technique and verbal artistry, while ducking many of his most transgressive ideological suggestions and his broader and bolder structural methods. Clearly enamored of Ariosto’s extraordinarily suggestive imagery and quicksilver versification, Calvino can nevertheless be said to have foregrounded his own style more than Ariosto did. In Ariosto’s work, every hendecasyllable of which flows with an assured inevitability, a paradoxically low number of individual verses sticks in the memory. This contrasts starkly with the way most well educated Italians have by heart at least a dozen lines of the Commedia to ventilate in public. With Letteratura, 274. For the index and introduction, see Cupersito, “Presenze.” 4 At a slightly earlier stage of my reflections on Orlando raccontato (in McLucas, “Dialogo”), I commented on the lack of Bloomian anxiety shown by Calvino in acknowledging his admiration for Ariosto. Further reflection has heightened my sense of the enforced impersonality and reticence of his tone, which place him, consciously or not, at a significant distance from his predecessor. 2 3 S-334 JOHN C. McLUCAS Ariosto, instead, one recalls countless incidents, situations, tones and characters but relatively few specific verses. Two exceptions, both from the very first of the forty-six cantos of the poem, are the aphoristic verses “ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra” (OF 1.7—“Behold how often human judgement goes astray”—all translations mine) and “Oh gran bontà de’ cavallieri antiqui!” (OF 1.22—“Oh, the great goodness of the knights of old!”); Calvino himself mentions the notoriety of these two verses in his “Presentazione.”5 Ariosto’s verse is always expert and graceful but his stylistic priority is always clarity rather than beauty: an excessively striking verse risks calling attention to itself and interrupting the author’s communication of both plot points and ideas to the reader. Ariosto was a literary artist of extremely disciplined professionalism, reflected in the very substantive revisions between the three editions of the Furioso. For the final, 1532 edition, he not only discarded a massive draft which he had perhaps planned to add to it—what are now called the Cinque canti—but also inserted five lengthy and thematically crucial new episodes.6 He also performed a Tuscanizing linguistic revision of the whole immense poem, submitting it to Bembo for vetting. To me, this modest and workmanlike task of revision shows that Ariosto wanted to make his verse transparent enough that the implications of his often subversive content can be directly conveyed to the reader. Ariosto has honed his verse so that the reader virtually never hesitates over the placement of a caesura or the scansion of the requisite eleven syllables. He does this in part by virtually eliminating diaeresis and by enforcing an absolutely consistent elision of all possible vowels, making the poem almost effortless to read aloud. This characteristic poetic surface, technically perfect yet self-effacing, is literary art at its most refined and conscientious. Calvino’s style, on the other hand, is overtly rich, showing a calculated alternation between semiarchaizing elegance and flatfooted colloquialism. An example of his classically balanced periodic style is the long absolute construction at the start of one chapter: “[s]parsi per il mondo dietro ad amori ed avventure i suoi più valorosi paladini, Carlo Magno attende impaziente il ritorno di Rinaldo, con i rinforzi dall’Inghilterra”7 (“With his most valiant paladins scattered across the map chasing love and adventure, Charlemagne impatiently awaits the return of Rinaldo with reinforcements from England”). Calvino, Orlando, 31-32. For a very condensed summary of the textual history of the poem, see Segre, “Introduzione,” especially xxviii. 7 Calvino, Orlando, 119. 5 6 M LN S-335 This sentence displays Latinate grammar, elegant word order and an adverbial adjective, impaziente. By contrast, we see a striking example of Calvino’s tangy modernity in his paraphrase of Orlando furioso 26.79. In Ariosto, the beautiful woman warrior Marfisa appears—for the only time in the book and only very briefly—in women’s clothing when, on a lark, she agrees to model a dress at a picnic with four male companions in arms. The domineering Saracen champion Mandricardo chances upon them and mistakes Marfisa for just another beautiful damsel. He challenges and unseats her four “defenders” seriatim and, claiming to have won her fair and square, he thus proposes to bestow her on his own unsuccessful rival in love. She replies, “Io sua non son, né d’altri son che mia: / dunque me tolga a me chi mi desia” (OF 26.79—“I am not theirs, nor am I anyone’s but my own: therefore anyone who desires me must take me from myself”). The dialogue between Mandricardo and Marfisa that climaxes in these terse lines fills two octaves in Ariosto’s poem. In retelling it, Calvino substitutes a concise, slangy modernization: — Adesso sei in mia mano,—[Mandricardo] fa alla donna. — In tua mano un corno,—risponde lei.8 “Now you are in my power,” he says to the woman. “Like hell I am,’ she replies.” The gendering of this riposte euphemizes a more bluntly phallic term that vulgar Italian might use contemptuously to dismiss a suggestion. As an aside, dealt with more systematically below, Calvino’s almost coarse recasting here fits Ariosto’s characterization of Marfisa as the more comically masculinized of his maiden warriors but it also reveals Calvino’s mild incomprehension of Ariosto’s classicizing stereotype of all women warriors as romantically beautiful. Even Ariosto’s heroine Bradamante comes in for regular humor at Calvino’s hands in the form of references to, for instance, her beloved Ruggiero’s returning to her “braccia amorose e salde”9 (“loving, sinewy arms”). Calvino derives stock mid-twentieth century comic effects from the image of powerful young women as necessarily “unfeminine” jocks, whereas the Renaissance poet conceives of the warrior maidens as mighty as well as lovely. Calvino’s stylistic virtuosity is particularly evident in the resourceful and inventive lexicon he laces through his prose, a variatio typified by passages such as his introduction of Mandricardo: “[v]alore e grandezza 8 9 Calvino, Orlando, 202. Calvino, Orlando, 62. S-336 JOHN C. McLUCAS d’animo sono nell’Orlando furioso equamente distribuiti tra Cristiani e Maomettani; e lo stesso si dica per le debolezze umane. Ma come abbondanza d’ammazzasette, di soldatacci giganteschi, brutali e millantatori, non c’è dubbio che la bilancia pende tutta dalla parte del campo saraceno”10 (“Valor and greatness of spirit are equally distributed between Christians and Muslims in the Orlando furioso, as are, be it said, human weaknesses. Nevertheless, when it comes to braggarts, brutes, swaggerers, and boastful berserkers, there is no doubt that the balance tips decidedly towards the Saracen camp”). These brief examples may suffice to show why, without in the slightest claiming that Calvino writes “better” than Ariosto, I maintain that he calls more attention to his own style and to the exuberant self-amusement of his writerly project than Ariosto does. While his style is arguably more conspicuous than Ariosto’s, Calvino is often intellectually less profound, in this book at least. This disparity is evident, for instance, in the authorial voice he adopts. Ariosto’s distracted, unreliable, irrational, self-contradictory, self-deprecating narrator is among his most original literary creations. The “I” who speaks throughout the Orlando furioso is often recognizably Ariosto himself: he makes frequent references to actual relationships, alliances and experiences in the life of the historical Ludovico Ariosto.11 Often, however, the narrator is a confused and manipulative “I” who becomes the emblem and embodiment of authorial autonomy and creative liberty.12 He is at times a weaver, at times a writer, at times a professional storyteller whose voice is tired by lengthy declamation.13 He claims several times to have been driven mad by his own love, as Orlando is by his,14 and is subject to appalling outbursts of savage Calvino, Orlando, 109. The apostrophe to Ippolito d’Este in OF 1.3-4 provides a very early example of how Ariosto as author embeds the narrative “I” into the specific content of his own biography. The proem to canto 40, especially octaves 3 and 4, are also unusually explicit in describing, in the first person, an actual incident of Ariosto’s career as a diplomat. Obviously, the long catalog of Ariosto’s friends and well-wishers who welcome the narrator to “shore” as the last canto begins (OF 46.1-19) represents a vivid conflation of the inconsequent narrator and the superbly connected Renaissance intellectual Ariosto. 12 One example among many might be the first octaves of canto 32, in which the narrator omits any kind of proem to describe his own confusion: he had promised Ippolito to tell the story of Bradamante’s jealousy but then forgets and is distracted by Rinaldo and, later, by Guidone and, he writes, only now makes up his mind to tell of Rinaldo and Gradasso—except that he decides first to speak of Agramante. 13 In OF 2.30 (“Ma perché varie fila a varie tele / uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intendo”), the narrator compares himself to a weaver. In OF 33.128 (“poi che da tutti i lati ho pieno il foglio, / finire il canto, e riposar mi voglio”), he is both a writer and a singer. 14 Already in OF 1.2, the narrator compares his own tottering mental state to that of his protagonist. Immediately after the later onset of Orlando’s madness, the narrator 10 11 M LN S-337 misogyny, followed by contrite, nearly groveling expressions of his adoration for women.15 He often begs pardon for having lost the thread of the narrative as he leaps between episodes in his complex web of interlocking stories yet, once the reader becomes accustomed to these maddening disruptions, a narrative architecture of impressive symmetry and splendor emerges. The question thus arises: is the narrating “I” the hapless, disorganized minstrel who muddles and frustrates his readers or the magisterial literary strategist who ordains the vast structure of the poem? And in either case, is this person “actually” Ludovico Ariosto? It may go without saying that, by engaging in this ambitious literary play on authorial identity, which encourages the reader to confuse the author with the narrator, Ariosto is audaciously inviting comparison with Dante.16 In contrast to the complexities of Ariosto’s shifting authorial voice, Calvino’s voice in Orlando raccontato is consistent, completely detached and impersonal. He almost never speaks in the first person and there are no references of any kind to the biographical circumstances of Calvino’s own life. His response to the sixteenth-century poem is very much that of writer to writer, technical and analytical. Perhaps inevitably, given the rigorous abridgements required by his più belle pagine approach, he eliminates entirely the rich play achieved by Ariosto, through his seemingly incompetent and unreliable narrator, in the frequent cross-cutting between tales so characteristic of the structure of the Orlando furioso. In this regard, Calvino occasionally comments directly on his practice, resulting for instance, in condensing the story of Atlante’s palace of illusions into a single chapter, combining episodes which Ariosto scatters across cantos 11, 12 and 22. Calvino offers the following explanation to his reader: [o]ccorre osservare che se ora, per comodità d’esposizione, abbiamo raccontato l’arrivo del liberatore Astolfo come immediatamente susseguente all’intrappolamento degli altri paladini, il poema in realtà segue un altro ritmo, ci arriva lentamente dopo un intervallo che dura ben dieci canti: dieci canti in cui la battaglia di Parigi, tra atti di eroismo incendi carneficine, cambia le sorti della guerra tra pagani e cristiani. Già ci eravamo accorti che da quell’epopea erano assenti quasi tutti i più famosi campioni; solo in a “lucido intervallo” (OF 24.3) imagines the reader reproaching him for not seeing that his own condition is analogous to that of the raving hero. 15 Most notoriously, the narrator at the close of canto 29 wishes that Orlando had dismembered all the women in the world and then apologizes to his women readers in the first four octaves of the following canto. 16 Ariosto’s vexed relationship with both patrons and literary predecessors is sensitively explored in Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony. See also Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic. S-338 JOHN C. McLUCAS la robusta presenza di Rodomonte torreggiava nella mischia. Finalmente sappiamo dove s’erano cacciati tutti gli altri. Atlante li aveva sequestrati nel suo labirinto, e ora ridà loro libero corso per le vie del poema. Atlante o Ariosto? La parte dell’incantatore che vuol ritardare il compiersi del destino e la parte del poeta che ora aggiunge personaggi alla storia, ora ne sottrae ora li agruppa, ora li disperde, si sovrappongono fino a identificarsi. La giostra delle illusioni è il palazzo, è il poema, è tutto il mondo.17 (It’s important to point out that, to tell the story more efficiently, we have related the arrival of the liberator Astolfo immediately following the entrapment of the other paladins. Ariosto’s poem actually follows a different rhythm, and reaches this point slowly, after an interruption which lasts a full ten cantos—ten cantos in which the battle of Paris, with all its deeds of heroism, its fires, its slaughters, shifts the fortunes of the war between pagans and Christians. We had already noticed that almost all the most famous champions were absent from that epic struggle; only the hulking presence of Rodomonte seemed to tower above the fray. Now at last, we learn where all the others had run off to. Atlante had imprisoned them in his labyrinth, and now he releases them to follow their careening course through the pathways of the poem. But… Atlante, or Ariosto? The role of the sorcerer on the one hand, who hopes to delay the outworkings of destiny, and the role of the poet on the other, who adds characters to the story one minute and removes them the next, now grouping them in clusters, now scattering them, overlap till they seem to become one and the same. The merry-go-round of illusions is the enchanted palace, yes… but it is also the poem, and it is the whole world.) Calvino’s choice here to omit exploration of the complexities of Ariosto’s narrative voice and of the almost inextricable structural interweaving which results from them is a charged one, for it allows the modern master to avoid reference to one of the most characteristic preoccupations of his own artistic maturity: the reader is hard put to recognize in this lucid, dispassionate, highly efficient commentator the Calvino who contrived the elaborate structure of his 1972 novel, Le città invisibili—in which categories like “Le città e la memoria,” “Le città e i segni,” or “Le città continue” recur in puzzling patterns within clusters of five that the reader is irresistibly 17 Calvino, Orlando, 176. Notice Calvino’s stylish elimination of commas in “eroismo incendi carneficine.” Note too the apposite choice represented by Calvino’s giostra, which in Italian is both “merry-go-round” and “joust.” Here Calvino proposes yet another complexity in Ariosto’s voice, suggesting that the author, consciously or not, identifies with one of his fictional characters. This would be in addition to Ariosto’s manipulation of a shifting narrative “I” who may or may not be the same as the author, a strategy mentioned here above but nowhere by Calvino. M LN S-339 tempted to interpret18—or Il castello dei destini incrociati, which overtly foregrounds the rich possibilities of interlocking narrative. Likewise, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore uses a self-thematizing complexity of structure provocatively to engage the reader in the frustrating problematics of reading, report, and literary production.19 Calvino was under no obligation to engage any particular aspect of Ariosto’s art in his commentary and in this book he writes as an essayist and commentator—perhaps even as a public intellectual—rather than in the artistically elaborated voice of a narrator of fiction. Quite rightly, he deflects the reader’s attention away from himself and towards the object of study and appreciation, Ariosto. That notwithstanding, most readers of Orlando raccontato would have already known Calvino’s fame as an author of fiction: indeed, that provides his strongest credential as a commentator. It is thus perhaps worth noticing that he almost completely eschews discussion of the elaborately interwoven structures so characteristic of Ariosto’s poetry and so directly relevant to his own literary work. While it is unimaginable that the kind of pyrotechnic structural experiments exuberantly practiced by Calvino himself did not at least in part derive from his prolonged and attentive study of Ariosto, there is essentially no mention of this aspect of Ariosto’s compositional practice in Orlando raccontato. Calvino shows a writer’s vivid interest in Ariosto’s mingling of genre, so typical of his own work (the neorealist, mythopoetic tragicomedy of the Marcovaldo stories may stand as one example). At least twice, he makes this the focus of his guidance to the reader. In the chapter “L’Isola di Alcina,” he describes the wrong-headed love affair of Ariosto’s romantic protagonist Ruggiero with the wicked sorceress Alcina, whose snares predictably trap Ruggiero before he is jolted back to his duty and to his noble fiancée Bradamante. Calvino presents the hero’s predicament explicitly as a jolting encounter between genres, epic and allegory: [a] sentir parlare di vizi e di virtù, Ruggiero già capisce quale piega sta prendendo la storia: era partito come personaggio di un poema cavalleresco, tutto avventure e meraviglie, ed ecco che rischia di ritrovarsi in mezzo ad un poema allegorico, in cui ogni apparizione ha un significato morale e pedagogico.20 18 See, for example, Alborini et al., Città, which explores among other things the mathematical combinatorics underlying the structure of Calvino’s book. My thanks to Franca Battigelli for the reference. 19 Notice also the zest with which Calvino coins Cimmerian, Cimbrian, Polish and other names in Se una notte. 20 Calvino, Orlando, 69. S-340 JOHN C. McLUCAS (When he hears all this talk of vice and virtue, Ruggiero understands where the story is headed: he started out as a character in a chivalric epic poem, full of adventures and marvels, and now he is in danger of finding himself in an allegory, in which every appearance is meant to teach some moral lesson.) This genre analysis becomes Calvino’s informing insight for his entire exposition of the Alcina episode. Another example invents an interior monologue of Ruggiero absent in Ariosto: “ecco che vede elevarsi le mura della splendida città d’Alcina. Questa dev’essere un’allegoria del piacere, pensa Ruggiero, e lo spirito bellicoso cede il campo a una più benigna inclinazione”21 (“Then he suddenly sees the walls of Alcina’s splendid city rising before him. ‘This must be an allegory of Pleasure,’ thinks Ruggiero, and his warlike spirit surrenders the field to a kindlier impulse”). And, again, Calvino paraphrases Ruggiero’s long wait for Alcina to come to his chamber: Ruggiero ha dimenticato che si trova in mezzo a figure allegoriche: le ore notturne passate a tendere l’orecchio, a contare con l’immaginazione i passi della maliarda, ad aspettare lo schiudersi della porta, bastano a convincerlo che il poema che egli vive è fatto non di fredda pedagogia ma di trepidante appetito vitale.22 (Ruggiero has forgotten that he is among the figures in an allegory. As he spends the hours of night listening for her, counting in his imagination the enchantress’ steps, waiting for her to open his door, he is able to convince himself that the epic he is living is made up, not of chilly moral lessons, but of anxious, exciting vital appetite.) The second instance I would cite of Calvino’s criticism by genreanalysis appears in his paraphrase of the deaths of Zerbino and Isabella, which for him represent the clash between epic and sentimental literature. Calvino has already pointed out how certain noble characters within Ariosto’s world are essentially invulnerable, while others, equally noble, are normal human beings susceptible to wounds and death. The wound which eventually kills Zerbino leads to this observation: [l]a ferita di Zerbino è di quelle che avrebbero fatto sorridere Orlando o Ruggiero o Rodomonte, ma Zerbino è fatto di carne e ossa e vene umane, e la guerra per lui è rischio di morte, non gioco. Non basta questo, però, per dire che personaggi come Zerbino e Isabella sono più veri dei giganteschi ammazzasette. Essi seguono semplicemente un’altra logica: sono eroi d’una storia lacrimosa, e in mezzo alle avventure grottesche e truculente Calvino, Orlando, 69-70. Calvino, Orlando, 70. 21 22 M LN S-341 aprono, con la loro vita e la loro morte, uno spazio poetico di dimensioni e sensibilità diverse.23 (Zerbino’s wound is the kind that Orlando, Ruggiero, or Rodomonte would have simply laughed off, but Zerbino is made of human flesh, blood, and bone, and for him war is not a game; for him, there is always a real risk of death. This isn’t enough, however, to justify the claim that characters like Zerbino and Isabella are more “real” than the brawny, blustering giants. They simply act out a different set of expectations, which has its own logic: they are the hero and heroine of a romantic tear-jerker, and by their lives and their deaths they create, in the midst of the grotesque and savage events of epic, an opening for a poetic space of different dimensions and sensibilities.) Here and after, Calvino subsumes into the single word grottesco the attributes previously implied to typify epic discourse, logically enough where the representative of the epic is Rodomonte, but for clarity I have added the word “epic” back into my translation. The polarity of lacrimoso and grottesco (“ecco che storia lacrimosa e storia grottesca si ricongiungono: Isabella incontra un prepotente che le sbarra la strada e le fa oltraggio. È Rodomonte…”—“And now the tearful love story intersects with the grotesque epic story. Isabella encounters an arrogant bully who blocks her path and threatens her with outrage. He is Rodomonte…”) continues for the rest of Calvino’s reading of this episode.24 Another of Calvino’s great priorities in guiding our reading is his appreciation for Ariosto’s graphic everyday metaphors. This is particularly highlighted in his handling of the Cimosco episode. In this story, the evil King Cimosco assails his enemies’ forces with an unchivalrous (and anachronistic) weapon, a primitive gun called the harquebus. Orlando finds this so outrageous that, once he has defeated Cimosco, he hurls the weapon into the depths of the Ocean. Because the issue is the clash between traditional military valor and a new democratic technology of mayhem, Calvino rightly says that Ariosto might have been expected to marshal his loftiest rhetoric; instead, he looks to daily life for his imagery: [i]nsomma, tanto per dare un’idea: Cimosco cerca di prendere Orlando alle spalle, come nel delta del Po i pescatori circondano le anguille con le reti, e vuole prenderlo vivo, come gli uccellatori che catturano gli uccelli da richiamo; Orlando si mette a infilzare nemici sulla lancia come tortellini sul forchettone del cuoco o come i pescatori ferraresi infilzano sullo spiedo Calvino, Orlando, 214 (italics original). Calvino, Orlando, 215. 23 24 S-342 JOHN C. McLUCAS quante rane ci stanno; Cimosco s’è andato ad appostare con l’archibugio puntato come un cacciatore dell’Appennino che attende un cinghiale; l’archibugiata uccide il cavallo ma fa saltar su Orlando, che pare quella volta che a Brescia è scoppiata una polveriera.25 (A few examples, just to give a sense: Cimosco tries to sneak up on Orlando from behind, just as fishermen in the Po delta toss their nets around eels, and hopes to take him alive, as hunters capture birds for use as decoys; Orlando sets about skewering enemy soldiers on his lance like tortellini on a cook’s fork or as Ferrarese fishermen crowd as many frogs onto the spit as will fit; Cimosco takes his position to aim the harquebus just like a hunter in the Apennines lying in wait for a wild boar. The harquebus shoots the horse out from under Orlando, but he leaps upward, like that time when a gunpowder magazine in Brescia exploded.) One passage gives sympathetic insight into Calvino’s enjoyment of the mechanics of writing: he articulates—and clearly shares—Ariosto’s glee in Italianizing the “exotic” names of the English nobles who march to the rescue of Charlemagne in the tenth canto: [c]ome far entrare in un poema italiano i nomi di Lancaster, di Warwick, di Gloucester? Li trasformeremo in Lincastro, Varvecia, Glocestra. E Clarence? e Norfolk? e Kent? Basterà dire Chiarenza, Nortfozia, Cancia. È un gioco che può continuare quanto si vuole: Pembroke diventa Pembrozia, Suffolk Sufolcia, Essex Essenia. E Northu[m]berland? La faccenda comincia a complicarsi. Berkley? Richmond? Dorchester? Hampton? L’impresa fonetica di Ariosto diventa una nuova imprevista avventura del poema.26 (How was he to fit into Italian verse such names as Lancaster, Warwick, and Gloucester? ‘We will make them into “Lincastro,” “Varvecia,” “Glocestra,”’ he decides. Clarence? Norfolk? Kent? ‘Let’s say “Chiarenza,” “Nortfozia,” and “Cancia.”’ This game can go on as long as one chooses: Pembroke becomes ‘Pembrozia,’ Suffolk ‘Sufolcia,’ and Essex ‘Essenia.’ How about Northumberland? Things are getting complicated. Berkley? Richmond? Dorchester? Hampton? This bold phonetic project of Ariosto’s becomes yet another, unexpected adventure within the poem.) This “avventura” recalls the delight Calvino took in inventing unpronounceable names for the characters in his 1965 collection Le cosmicomiche (for example, the palindromic protagonist Qfwfq). There are very significant aspects of Ariosto’s achievement that Calvino chooses not to address. Having already highlighted Calvino’s warm response to Ariosto’s unrivaled literary craft, I would like to note Calvino, Orlando, 79. Calvino, Orlando, 95. The first-person plural in trasformeremo might easily be taken as a collegial reference to Ariosto and Calvino. 25 26 M LN S-343 that he shows relatively little interest in the profound and iconoclastic content of Ariosto’s magnum opus. Much research over the past few decades has focused on Ariosto’s very bold speculations on gender.27 The poem directly addresses such issues: the militancy and autonomy of women, figured in part through the conventional characters of the maiden warriors, one of whom is the poem’s romantic heroine; a discourse I call sexual polemics, in which men and women debate women’s sexual rights and the double standard and, through their behavior, suggest that in fact the sexes are capable of equal constancy and equal perfidy; male and female homosexuality and transvestitism; the objectification of women (and occasionally men) for their beauty; and both patriarchal and matriarchal fictional political systems. I generally bracket these very provocative philosophical and ethical suggestions within Ariosto’s over-arching fascination with all forms of balance and symmetry and his related distaste for the intemperate inherited social hierarchies of one category over another. Given the overtly encomiastic nature of the Furioso and its author’s status as a dependent and retainer of the Este family ruling Ferrara, this consistent critique of received systems of thought may be considered a heroic literary manifesto for reform. Ariosto’s “apology” for his patrons was as complex as Vergil’s “propaganda” for Augustus. In any case, Calvino consistently declines to engage Ariosto’s speculative audacity in favor of analyzing the writerly tactics and tools described above. Calvino’s choices in citing and omitting Ariostean passages sheds light on his cogent reading of the classic poet. The major passages which, surprisingly, do not appear in Calvino’s paraphrase and summary are as follows: Angelica and the doddering but lustful hermit (from OF canto 2); Bradamante pushed into the cave by Pinabello (2); Melissa with Bradamante in the tomb of Merlin (3); Rinaldo in Scotland, with the entire tale of Ginevra and Ariodante, and Rinaldo’s defense of women’s sexual emancipation (4-6); most of Isabella’s backstory (13); Grifone and his faithless mistress Orrigille (15-18); Norandino and Lucina and the Orco (18); the Man-killing Women (20); most of the story of Gabrina (21); Bradamante, her twin brother Ricciardetto and the princess Fiordispina’s infatuation with both of them (25); the Rocca di Tristano, where Bradamante marshals both rhetoric and force of arms to fight misogyny (32); Marganorre (37); Rinaldo’s encounter with Jealousy and his visit to the jealous husband 27 See, for example, McLucas, “Faccio o nol”; and McLucas, “Amazon.” The literature on Ariosto and gender is vast and encompasses works from Shemek, Ladies to Stoppino, Genealogies. S-344 JOHN C. McLUCAS (42); and Anselmo, Argia and the rich Ethiopian (43). Equally surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Calvino dedicates an entire chapter each to the duels of Marfisa and Bradamante and of Ruggiero and Rinaldo. It is almost as though Calvino had known precisely the tales that would prove most important to modern studies of gender politics in Ariosto and decided to ignore them. To summarize, Calvino’s major interests are the literary depiction of enchantment, the quirky and delightful flashes of earthy naturalism which Ariosto from time to time displays, a conventional and prefeminist inflection of romantic love,28 and always, perhaps principally, the artistic mechanics of composition. The Orlando furioso becomes for him a splendid laboratorio di scrittura from which he encourages the reader to savor engaging examples of the writer’s craft and bravura. As a powerful, innovative literary artist in his own right, he concentrates on these aspects of Ariosto’s achievement, and defers into his own creative work, and without comment here, his response to Ariosto’s profounder suggestions. Both in what he says and in what he does not say, Calvino is among the most perceptive readers of Ariosto, unrivaled among those whose own writings spring from the inspiration of the master. Towson University 28 Calvino’s engagement with contemporary movements and polemics led him rather quickly after the publication of Orlando raccontato to respond to feminism by name: see Se una notte (96), where “commandos di femministe” figure among the forces pushing literature away from a putative past simplicity in the act of reading of fiction and, by implication, towards an increasing ideological and theoretical abstraction.