Translating Women in Early Modern England

Gender in the Elizabethan Versions of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso

Selene Scarsi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138276192
• eBook ISBN: 9781317007142
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Situating itself in a long tradition of studies of Anglo-Italian literary relations in the Renaissance, this book consists of an analysis of the representation of women in the extant Elizabethan translations of the three major Italian Renaissance epic poems (Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata), as well as of the influence of these works on Elizabethan Literature in general, in the form of creative imitation on the part of poets such as Edmund Spenser, Peter Beverley, William Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel, and of prose writers such as George Whetstone and George Gascoigne. The study emphasises the importance of European writers' influence on English Renaissance Literature and raises questions pertaining to the true essence of translation, adaptation and creative imitation, with a specific emphasis on gender issues. Its originality lies in its exhaustiveness, as well as in its focus on the epics' female figures, both as a source of major modifications and as an evident point of interest for the Italian works' 'translatorship'.

PART 1
(Mis)translating Women: Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse

Chapter 1
Ariosto’s Female Knights

Introductory

Baptised in 1560, Sir John Harington1 had the privilege of having Queen Elizabeth herself as his godmother, an honour bestowed upon the family as a recognition of the loyalty of the Haringtons during Elizabeth’s imprisonment in the Tower of London under Queen Mary’s reign. A career at court was the objective of Sir John’s life, and the times of forced absence from it, such as, for instance, the years of ‘banishment’ following the appearance of his translation of the Giocondo tale from Ariosto, were bitterly resented. His attempts to advance at court often ‘involv[ed] sophisticated exploitation of the media of manuscript and print’,2 and the rich 1591 edition of the Orlando Furioso is testament to this. His search for patronage under both Elizabeth and James was, overall, unsuccessful, largely because of his reputation as a ‘wit’ and not as a serious writer, a reputation clearly intensified by the publication of works such as his punningly-entitled treatise on the flushing toilet, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). He seems to have resigned to a life away from court only in the final years of his life, when he retired to his estate in Kelston, where he died in 1612.

The compositional circumstances of Sir John Harington’s translation are as dubious as they are fascinating. The tradition maintains that, in the 1580s, he translated a portion of Ariosto’s masterpiece, the tale of Giocondo included in canto XXVIII, and circulated it at Court: when it came to the hands of Elizabeth, the Queen proclaimed her disgust at the bawdiness of the story, considered as potentially corrupting for her ladies-in-waiting, and punished the author by confining him to his country estate in Kelston until the translation of the complete poem was produced. The legend is somewhat backed by the fact that Harington himself wrote, in the Metamorphosis of Ajax, that his Orlando Furioso was the result of a punishment by the Queen.3

The translation, despite being notably shorter than the original in the body of the text, is, however, accompanied by a wealth of extra-textual material: beautiful engravings that render Harington’s work one of the richest books of the time, as well as an elaborate critical apparatus, containing, among other sections, an allegory of the poem and a ‘Preface, or rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie, and of the Author and Translator’, heavily inspired by the commentaries on the Furioso circulating in Italy in the decades after the poem was published, and in particular by the 1549 Spositione Sopra l’Orlando Furioso by Simone Fornari.4

The question of Haringtonian criticism is particularly complex: perhaps because of the popularity of his translation, the work has been studied and discussed by critics without necessarily knowing Ariosto’s original; in other words, the translation has been read, more often than not, as an original poem and not as the rendition of a foreign work. This attitude has led to serious misunderstandings as to the true value of the poem, and Ben Jonson’s famous monitum recorded by William Drummond, that ‘John Haringtones Ariosto, under all translations was the worst’,5 corroborated by Matthiessen’s softer remark that ‘Harington’s Ariosto neither suggest[s] the qualities of the original, nor possess[es] exceptional poetic merit in compensation’,6 has been forgotten in favour of enthusiastic celebrations of the work, ranging from McNulty’s comment that ‘[e]ven in an age famous for translation Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse stands out from its honoured fellows’7 to Peter France’s ‘Harington’s translation is not merely dashing but precise, shadowing the inflections of the original with an attentiveness and intelligence few later translators have matched’.8

Many critics talk of a supposed fidelity of spirit that even the most superficial look reveals to be unfounded. Glaringly misreading the text, most ignore Harington’s agenda towards women; this, unfortunately, happens even in the most recent criticism. For instance, Morini devotes a chapter to Harington, mentioning his treatment of women only once, in less than a paragraph, and in an over-simplistic way:

[S]ometimes Harington strikes a misogynist chord which is typical of his age: when Orlando sees Angelica’s love for Medoro carved on the bark of trees, Harington writes that ‘she, to bost of that was her shame, / Vsd oft to write hers and Medoros name’ (Harington, 1591, XXIII. 78), where ‘bost’ and ‘her shame’ are wholly his own. But on the whole, neither the notes nor the interpolations are as many as could be expected.9

The example chosen by Morini is certainly not the most representative of Harington’s misogyny, of which several more informative instances will be considered and analysed at length in the course of this chapter; in addition, his conclusive statement is imprecise, and needs to be redressed10.

Even more strikingly, Jane Everson’s 2005 article on Harington’s modifications and omissions first states, analysing the translation in general, that ‘his rendering of Ariosto’s stanzas [is] often both wonderfully precise and sensitive to tone’11, and then, studying, specifically, the omissions, admits the need to investigate the quality and reasons of these. As will be exhaustively studied in this section, the tone of the original (especially the irony) is, conversely, more often than not missed in Harington, as proven by other critics, such as Daniel Javitch, whose study of the translation concentrates on the omission of Ariosto’s irony and his consequent ‘normalization’ of the epic.12 Everson expands on an exhaustive analysis of Harington’s omissions concerning geography, and relegates his excision of important female figures to the final pages of her article, citing the single specific example of Isabella d’Este and providing a striking justification for Harington’s choice:

He avoids mentioning Isabella d’Este by name, concentrating instead on her husband’s victory at Fornovo, and praising her not for her virtues and achievements but for being a good wife […]. The reasons for this omission [are connected] with a desire to avoid provoking the jealous wrath of the Queen, the only legitimate object of such lavish praise in the environment in which Harington is operating.13

This rationale seems hardly plausible, both because the exemplum of a foreign noblewoman would have been easily transformed into a praise of a corresponding English female patron or of the Queen herself, and because a veto on literary celebrations of patrons or authorities on the grounds of jealousy on the part of the author’s own living rulers would automatically exclude from literature all positive mentions of any – fictitious or real – nobleman or noblewoman apart from the current rulers, an hypothesis against which literature itself revolts. Everson’s comment is also blotted by a serious mistake which is inexplicable if her profession of a careful line-by-line analysis of the translation against its original is to be believed: her statement that Ariosto’s praise of the poetess Vittoria Colonna remains ‘unchanged’.14 Everson concludes that

As Harington’s version of the Furioso demonstrates, translation is an activity fraught with value judgements, cultural as well as linguistic, but surely dependent above all on empathy between author and translator, and translator and audience. It is a measure of Harington’s genius that he was able to produce a version that satisfied an exacting patron and a sophisticated audience of courtiers four hundred years ago, and which continues today to offer such a lively and fluent approach to Ariosto’s text.15

It is exactly this notion of a supposed ‘empathy between author and translator’, as well as the long-held myth of the fidelity of Harington’s translation, that this chapter wishes to challenge; and, in order to do so, the study will concentrate on the treatment of the female figures, the topic of the poem that the translator most visibly – and most deliberately – alters and silences.

The categorisation of Ariosto’s poem as proto-feminist is corroborated by the most authoritative Italian criticism of the past five decades. For instance, Mario Santoro – perhaps the critic who has written most exhaustively about this issue, devoting large sections of two of his major works specifically to the ‘woman question’ –, writes about the centrality of this theme in Ariosto’s mind, and, referring in particular to Rinaldo’s attitude in the Ginevra episode, comments:

Nel discorso di Rinaldo il poeta traduceva e sperimentava un motivo fondamentale della sua cognizione del reale: il riconoscimento dei diritti della donna e della sua parità con l’uomo nella vita sociale. Egli così si faceva interprete e coscienza di un processo di affrancamento e di emancipazione della donna che, sotto la spinta della cultura umanistica, si sviluppò e maturò nel corso della civiltà rinascimentale.16

[With Rinaldo’s speech, the poet made explicit, and experimented with, a fundamental theme of his vision of the world: the recognition of women’s rights and their equality with men in social life. He, thus, became an interpreter and embodied a consciousness of the process of liberation and emancipation of women which, spurred by Humanist culture, developed and matured in Renaissance society]

[I]l problema dell’emancipazione della donna e del riconoscimento dei suoi diritti, della sua condizione e del suo destino, costituisce un motivo ricorrente nell’arco di tutto il poema.17

[The issue of women’s emancipation and of the recognition of women’s rights, of their situation and their destiny, is a recurring theme throughout the poem].

C. Salinari and C. Ricci take an even clearer stance:

Significativi e numerosi sono gli interventi sulla donna, che riflettono la particolare attenzione di Ariosto alla problematica femminile. Sono riflessioni caratterizzate da una posizione chiaramente filogina a favore della parità dei sessi, in polemica contro la violenza verso le donne e contro il maschilismo, e dal riconoscimento della sensibilità e dell’eccellenza artistica femminile; e del resto non si dimentichi che le donne costituiscono il pubblico e l’interlocutore privilegiato del poeta […]. La simpatia per le donne non esclude, peraltro, anche le molte considerazioni sulle debolezze, la fragilità, gli errori, la volubilità del gentil sesso. Ma non si tratta, a nostro avviso, di residui di maschilismo o di misoginia, quanto della consapevolezza (che è in tutto il poema) di quale labirintica avventura sia la selva della vita, con i suoi vani sentieri e i suoi ‘errori’, che coinvolgono le donne come gli uomini, avvinti dalle loro passioni, cui è sempre fragile schermo lo scudo della ragione.18

[The comments on women are significant and numerous, and they reflect Ariosto’s special attention for the ‘woman question’. These are reflections characterised by a clearly philogynist position, in favour of equality between the sexes, against violence towards women and against misogyny, and by the recognition of women’s artistic sensitivity and excellence. After all, let us not forget that women represent the audience and the interlocutors favoured by the poet (…). This high consideration for women does not exclude, though, the several comments on the sex’s weakness, frailty, mistakes, inconstancy. But, in our opinion, these comments are not glimmers of male chauvinism or misogyny; rather, they represent the awareness (visible throughout the poem) that life is a maze-like adventure, with wrong paths leading to nowhere and ‘mistakes’, which involve men as well as women, preys to passion, against whic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 (Mis)translating Women: Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse
• PART 2 Female Figures in Elizabethan Translations of the Gerusalemme Liberata
• PART 3 From Partial Translations to Adaptations and Imitations
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index