Half-serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci.

Mark Davie, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. 199 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-7165-2601-8.

The poetic achievement of Luigi Pulci (1432-1484) has suffered a long period of relative neglect in the English-speaking world. That neglect in part occurred because no complete translation of Pulci's work was available. Lord Byron began translating the thoroughly daunting Morgante but abandoned the project, and in 1861 he published the cantos he had managed to complete. Though the debt owed Pulci by Tasso, Boiardo, Ariosto, Cervantes, Rabelais, and Calderon de la Barca is enormous, and though traces of Pulci's influence appear in Spenser and as late as Goethe, since Byron's time English readers of continental literature in translation have largely forgotten that Luigi Pulci sparked both a revolution in the uses to which Renaissance authors put the chivalric tradition of Charlemagne and his peers and a change in the way authors interacted with their material. Recently, however, the poetic achievement of Luigi Pulci has started to regain the sort of attention it deserves from speakers of English. Two examples of the English reawakening of Pulci studies have appeared from the press within months of one another. Joseph Tusiani's translation of Pulci's Morgante - the first complete English translation ever - and Mark Davie's careful and illuminating study of Pulci's narrative art, Half-serious Rhymes.

Davie's book will appeal principally to specialists who command both English and Italian. Though his commentary would edify anyone interested in the history of letters, Davie illustrates his discussion with extensive passages of untranslated Italian. One wishes that Tusiani's English version had been available to Davie so that the latter's work could find the wider audience it deserves.

The very bulk of Pulci's poem precludes the possibility of a bilingual edition that would be both legible and financially viable. Persons interested in the art of translation and wishing to compare the full text of Tusiani's translation with its original will thus need to find copies of Franca Ageno's definitive edition of Morgante (1955), or one of the other recent editions by Giuseppe Fatini (1927, reprint 1984), Giuliano Dego (1992), or Giuseppe De Robertis (1962). Readers with a limited command of Italian, however, can make profitable use of Davie and Tusiani together to gain a clearer idea of the validity of Davie's arguments.

A poet in his own right, Tusiani has been at pains to create an English Morgante that reflects both the form and the content of Pulci's work. Whereas Pulci's Italian hendecasyllabic octaves rhyme abababcc, Tusiani has chosen to approximate that form with an English blank verse sestette, followed by a rhyming or half-rhyming pentameter couplet. This technique proves variably successful. While it generally preserves a sense of the original, it also frequently results in a quasi-archaic diction that will not always appeal to some modern tastes. Those who consider inversion and archaism legitimate techniques for verse translation of early poems will feel better pleased than those who prefer conventional word order and a more exclusively contemporary idiom. From time to time, some will find idiomatic English word order and syntax stretched to their limits and the English verse less tightly woven than the Italian original.

Despite such occasional distractions, however, Tusiani generally succeeds in capturing both the meaning and the tone of his original. Telling Orlando of his love for Meridiana, King Manfredonio speaks (2.68) as touchingly in the English as in the Italian, and the threatening tension that escalates throughout the insulting meal Brunoro sets before Rinaldo (3.37-43) proves as suspenseful in Tusiani's translation as in Pulci's original. Tusiani is especially skilled at finding or sometimes coining English equivalents for expressions that Pulci has drawn from Florentine street idiom, for linguistic rarities, and for proverbs whose secondary meaning weighs more heavily than their literal ones.

The translation also succeeds at communicating Pulci's capacity for burlesque, as in the wizard Malagigi's overcoming the prowess of the giants Cattabriga and Fallalbacchio (24.92-99). In addition, Tusiani successfully conveys the humorous elements of the original. Having an English Morgante at last will long benefit both historians of English letters and comparativists. Tusiani's monumental labor of love has earned him a continuing debt of gratitude from all serious students of European literature.

The value of this volume, nevertheless, extends far beyond the translation itself. Edoardo A. Lebano's introduction and notes set the translation in its historical and biographical context, survey the relevant criticism, trace Pulci's sources through the tangles of chivalric romance, and conduct an ongoing and balanced contribution to the vexed question of Pulci's religious convictions or lack thereof. Essentially, Lebano agrees with those who suspect Pulci of having been a skeptic and an apostate. These of course included Pulci's contemporary clergy who denied him interment in consecrated ground. Throughout his introduction and notes, Lebano takes special pains to point out the direct and implicit evidence for this view. Beyond this, Lebano usefully summarizes the action, glosses names, notes and accounts for significant departures from the literal sense of the Italian, and explains otherwise opaque situations arising from allusions to matters outside of or elsewhere in the text.

A comprehensive bibliography and an index of names round nut the excellent apparatus of the book. In this single substantial volume, except for Pulci's minor works and his letters, one has everything one needs for a thorough introduction to the poet.

Mark Davie, borrowing his title from the phrase Lord Byron used to describe Pulci's verse, "half-serious rhymes," delves deeper into many of the issues Lebano raises and addresses others as well. Not only does Davie discuss Morgante, he also considers that work's relation to Pulci's other narrative poems: La giostra di Lorenzo de' Medici; the Ciriffo Calvaneo, Pulci's unfinished sequel to Morgante; and to Pulci's apparent source for the first version of Morgante, the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana's manuscript Orlando (Mediceo-Palatino N. F. 78). In this last connection, Davie considers the role of the Orlando as a more important and very different sort of influence on Pulci than does Constance Jordan in her Pulci's Morgante: Poetry and History in Fifteenth-Century Florence (1986).

Principally, Davie seeks to address two questions: "What . . . did Pulci conceive his task to be, and what were the expectations of his contemporary readers?" (7) To answer them, Davie surveys in detail the critical issues Morgante raises and the responses of his predecessors to those issues. He then traces the development of Pulci's narrative technique through successive versions of the Morgante, examines Pulci's debt to the manuscript Orlando, to the Driadeo d'amore by Pulci's brother Luca, and, in the final stages of Morgante's development, to Angelo Poliziano, and to Donato Acciaiuoli's Vita Caroli Magni (1461). Davie also considers Pulci's original contributions.

As an indication of the richly crafted and complex texture of Davie's study, I quote a portion of the final paragraph of his introduction: "Pulci's work on the Morgante and its continuations over more than twenty years effectively created a new genre of narrative poetry, characterized by the presence in the text of a self-aware narrator able to exploit his relationship with his material and with his audience, resulting in a high level of topicality, verbal humour and parody. It was a product of . . . the terms of Lucrezia's [de' Medici] original commission; the . . . available . . . source . . . the distinctive chemistry with which he reacted to it . . . [and] the changing intellectual climate of . . . Florence, which obliged Pulci to adapt his technique . . . as the work progressed. Moreover the work's prolonged gestation made Pulci's relationship with his audience one of mutual influence. . ." (27).

In the course of his discussion, Davie definitively establishes Pulci's essential originality. Even though the poet regularly follows sources that render his poem deeply intertextual, as the Morgante develops, the poet's synthesizing genius indelibly stamps the work as his own. At one point, Davie affirms the suggestion that Pulci cites "Arnaldo" as his authority when the material he treats is his own independent writing (160). Davie throws into sharp relief the editorial and narrative problems that Pulci confronted as he recognized difficulties in his sources like the preternaturally wise Charlemagne's apparently foolish susceptibility to Gano's treachery. This difficulty Pulci addresses by suggesting that Charlemagne grows wiser as he ages, by proposing that he was blind to Gano's treachery because that was God's will, and by asserting that people are reluctant to think ill of those in whom they have earlier reposed confidence. These alternatives Davie finds indicative of Pulci's willingness to entertain possible solutions based on the ordinary progress of life, on the operation of providence, and on psychological realism. The poet's concomitant unwillingness to decide among such alternatives establishes a kind of creative tension - a tension that characterizes his later work and one that Davie finds Pulci eventually learned to use as an important artistic resource.

Davie's clearly written book also contains useful apparatus - good notes at chapter ends, an appendix containing selected source texts, a bibliography (less comprehensive than Lebano's though with reference to comprehensive bibliographies), an index to names and one to principal text references.

Taken together, these two welcome and significant works suggest that the pace of Pulci studies among English speakers is markedly - and deservedly - picking up.

JAMES WYATT COOK Albion College