Amorum Libri: The Lyric Poems of Matteo Maria Boiardo.

Accompanied by celebrated courtiers including Boiardo, Borso d'Este traveled to Rome in March of 1471 to be elevated from marquis to duke of Ferrara. The trip ended Boiardo's real or imagined relationship with Antonia Caprara, the object of desire in the poet's great lyric cycle, titled in Ovidian fashion the Amorum libri. Boiardo would have known la Caprara during attendance at the court of Sigismondo d'Este, one of Borso's half-brothers, who governed Reggio after 1462. She seems to have been a real person, born in 1451. In 1476 Boiardo spent several months in Ferrara as companion to Duke Ercole d'Este. The manuscript of the Amorum libri dates from this period (cod. Egerton 1999, date die quarto Ianuarii MCCCCLXXVII).

In his opening sonnet Boiardo distinguishes the lyric past of his "easy days of youthful bloom" from the narrative moment when he "gather[s] all those musings here / that maddened thought addressed to me in love." He did not dedicate his work to any of the Este, but he does mention two women of the Strozzi family (his mother was the sister of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi) in the title to canzone 82. The work is composed of three sections, each containing 50 sonnets and 10 poems in different rhyme schemes. The three divisions reflect joy, disillusionment, and a bitter-sweet melancholy. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti notes a certain mannerism and monotony of theme in the poems, which otherwise vie for preeminence in Quattrocento Italy.

Boiardo is the least spatial of poets; his visual effects are aerial, depending on gradations of light - a form of perspective we associate with Leonardo da Vinci, his near contemporary. His strength is lyricism, the quality this translation properly strives to render. Di Tommaso translates every line like music. Attention to assonance often accounts for the translator's inspired and wide-ranging selection of words that makes full use of the breadth of English to render the narrower semantic band of Boiardo's Italian.

Boiardo used some of his lyric lines again in his Innamorato. The last line of the first poem is repeated by Agricane (Orlando Innamorato 1.18.46) - "se in vista e vivo, vivo e senza core." Di Tommaso renders this in blank verse: he who does not love "may seem to live, but lives without a heart." His line is liquid. (My eight syllable line depends on dramatic expression: Any knight who despises love "Lives heartless - he just seems alive.") The different translations reflect the difference between a lyric and narrative project.

Boiardo's most successful moments, where he escapes the limits of Petrarchism, perhaps not unnaturally elude the translator, as in sonnet 30, where "Roses and lilies give me by the handful" seems a bit pedestrian for "Datime a piena mano e rose e zigli." But the sense is accurate here as elsewhere in this welcome translation, which provides English readers for the first time with a means to gauge Boiardo's stunning achievement in verse.

In his introduction di Tommaso stresses the psychological story of veneration, frustration, disappointment, and orientation toward the world that make these poems an acute register of poetic sensibility. The Italian text is printed on facing pages and notes are conveniently located on the same page as the poems.

Charles Ross PURDUE UNIVERSITY