Lettere Poetiche.

Torquato Tasso. Ed. Carla Molinari. Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo / Ugo Guanda, 1995. 521 pp. n.p. ISBN: n.a.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution to appear on the four-hundredth anniversary of Tasso's death is Carla Molinari's edition of the fifty surviving letters that the poet wrote from March 1575 to July 1576 while he was completing Creme liberata and submitting it to the review of five consultants: Scipione Gonzaga, Luca Scalabrino, Silvio Antoniano, Pietro Angeli da Barga, and Sperone Speroni. Most of these "Lettere Poetiche," as they are called, are addressed to Gonzaga (thirty-five in all), and except for one to Antoniano, the rest are to Scalabrino. If there were any letters to Barga and Speroni they were not included in the original collection of these letters that accompanied the 1587 Vassalini edition of Tasso's Discorsi dell'arte poetica, nor were they subsequently recuperated. As Molinari points out in her lengthy "Nota al Testo," thirty-eight of the letters in her volume derive from this 1587 edition, eleven more from Guasti's massive edition of Tasso's epistolario (published in 1852-55), and one letter (XV in this volume) from the "lettere inedite" appended to Solerti's 1895 Vita. Molinari not only provides the first adequately annotated edition of the "Lettere Poetiche" but also the first edition to arrange them in chronological order (for the convenience of scholars who have heretofore depended on Guasti's edition, which has had to serve as the standard one for 140 years, she provides Guasti's numbering after the new number she gives each letter).

Readers will especially value Molinari's copious notes even though they greatly exceed the length of each letter. In the short span of this review I can only list some of the most useful features of her apparatus. First, she identities precisely the segments of cantos or the particular octaves (parts of which she cites when stylistic issues or revisions are raised) of the Gerusalemme that Tasso refers to in individual letters. At the end of the volume she also provides an index that runs through each canto of the Gerusalemme, citing where in the letters those parts of the poem are discussed. Second, the notes often provide pertinent references to Tasso's other writings on poetics, in particular the Discorsi dell'arte poetica (composed around 1562-64) which had already broached topics discussed again in the letters (e.g., the use of history in epic; the differences between epic and tragedy; the magnificent style proper to epic) so that one can easily relate Tasso's observations about his poem to his more theoretical pronouncements. Molinari also often cites in the notes the various passages from Aristotle's Poetics, or interpretations of them (especially Castelvetro's) to which Tasso refers quite elliptically. Finally, Molinari has taken the trouble of providing cross references, especially to topics or issues that continued to preoccupy Tasso throughout the correspondence: for example, the poem's unity and, relatedly, the legitimacy of various episodes; history vs. poetic mimesis; Virgil and Homer as justifying models; and other issues bearing on epic's particular features (as listed above). While one can only appreciate the cross-references when looking for the separate occasions on which Tasso addresses these and other topics, it is a pity that Molinari did not add an index of such topics to the three indices she does provide.

This edition is also valuable for the new perceptions generated by the "Lettere Poetiche." Molinari's introduction (ix-xliv) reconstructs the chronology of the revision and ends with the very suggestive claim that, overall, Tasso's revision reflects a pattern quite similar to the plot of Tasso's chival ric epic, at least before the final conquest of Jerusalem: an initial determination to fulfill a prime objective (in this case submitting the retouched poem for immediate publication) is sidetracked and delayed by various diversionary adventures (the experimenting with additions and deletions), temptations (to reorder the original narrative structure), and doubts. In other words, Tasso deviated from the mission of getting his poem published in ways analogous to his chivalric crusaders. His choices were willed. Molinari's introduction and her commentary reveal how relatively little of the revision was imposed on him. Had he really heeded his advisers the vulgate edition of the Gerusalemme would have been quite different (for example, it would not still include the Sofronia episode). Amedeo Quondam has rightly beckoned students of Tasso to discard the perception (constructed in the nineteenth century) of these advisers as censors who forced the poet to conform to post-Tridentine norms of correctness, and to consider them instead as editorial consultants. Molinari helps us recognize them as such. Their critical feedback may have provoked doubts in Tasso, but the feedback was controlled by the poet (Molinari points out, for example, how he deferred sending Speroni finished sections of the poem in order to forestall his criticism) or else invited by him so that, in his responses, he could more fully justify his procedures or affirm his poem's classical pedigree. Aside, then, from facilitating our reading of the "Lettere Poetiche" and elucidating them, Carla Molinari's commentary helps change the sinister image of their recipients, and shows how the letters were fashioned to enhance the poet's reputation and to make more explicit the self-justification that had shaped many of the directives in the earlier Discorsi dell'arte poetica. No wonder that their first editor, G.B. Licino, appended the letters to the original edition of that treatise.

DANIEL JAVITCH New York University