Even if Teofilo Folengo’s Baldo had not already come
highly recommended (via a suggestion from humblehappiness regarding gems of early modern Italian literature), I would have known from its opening lines that I was in
for something special. The narrator of this 15,000 hexameter line poem, which
first appeared in 1517, announces that he will disdain such muses as
“Melpomene, or that chump Thalia, or Apollo scratching his little guitar,” and
instead call upon the aid of those “paunchy muses,” the Macaronic sisters, who,
reclining on the crests of high mountains enclosing “a lake of soup and a sea
of gravy,” use immense graters to shred cheese “between the slopes of soft,
fresh butter” where “a hundred caldrons steam up to the clouds, full of
tortelloni, macaroni and tagliatelle.”
Now these sound like my kinds of muses.
This celebration of Italian culinary marvels appears both as
content (sometimes) and style (always), the latter labeled “Macaronic” due to
the mélange – akin to the admixture of flour, butter, eggs and cheese in the
type of fare that appears in the poem’s opening - of “word parts from Northern
Italian dialects and from various eras of Latin and Italian, enshrined in Latin
syntax.” The result is a mesmerizing language (especially when one attempts to
read the original aloud) directed at having a bit of fun with the conventional Renaissance
appreciation of classical Latin and Greek. While undoubtedly Folengo’s
linguistic humor and “continuous parade of synonyms” must lose something in
translation, Ann Mullaney’s riotously effervescent, two-volume, first-ever
English version, which retains the original Macaronic verse on facing pages,
nevertheless proves rambunctious, terrific, comic fun. In her spry
introduction, Mullaney calls Baldo “a cure for sobriety one uncorks
privately,” but expresses a desire that “the remedy” of this comedy be better
known. I’m happy to do what I can to further that goal.
Reading Baldo after revisiting Ariosto’s Orlando
furioso required an abrupt shift in expectations. The juxtaposition of the
two works in part underscores how extraordinary is the achievement of Ariosto’s
poem, with which Baldo is more or less contemporary, but Folengo’s work, even
to a non-scholar like myself, provides tremendous pleasures on its own terms. There’s
a small bit of overlap between the two, in that Folengo himself would go on to
write a lengthy poem featuring Orlando, and the eponymous hero of Baldo
is himself an ironic, Orlando-like warrior, characterized at birth as
…that oak of prowess, that flower of
gallantry, Baldo – a lightning bolt in battle, a sword of justice, a shield of
strength, who amid arrows, amid battles will be a shatterer of lances, a
fire-brand and a flame, like a terrifying cannon fired at enemy troops. Not
even the hardness of mountains or of steel, or a vast bastion or the strong
protection of thick walls will be able to withstand the hammer of his might.
The young Baldo is even an avid reader of the exploits of
Orlando and his fellow knights, at one point listing various tomes in which his
heroes appear.
But in most other respects, both Folengo’s poem and his protagonist
could not differ more from those of Ariosto, who in comparison comes off almost
as a moralizing goody-two-shoes. The difference is especially acute in regard
to women, Baldo’s sole defense of whom, a diatribe by Baldo’s wife Berta
against the injustices of men, is eclipsed by the bad end facing nearly all of
the women in the poem, including Berta, and by the opprobrium heaped upon “scabrous
whoredom” and “the shithouses of Venus” along the way. In place of the amiable,
high-spirited narrative of Ariosto, seemingly always primed to fly to the
heavens, Baldo, a caustic and decadent outlaw tale, heads in the opposite
direction, and in fact spends an inordinate amount of time underground. Mullaney
situates the poem on a continuum that traverses Petronius’ Satyricon,
Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and Boccacio. Perhaps best known as one of the
chief influences on Rabelais, Baldo possesses a similar no-holds-barred,
capricious wallowing in scams and tricks, wanton violence, and the
scatological. There is a lot of drinking, a good deal of shit, and an over-abundance
of fart jokes. Folengo celebrates the low, sordid, anti-authoritarian exploits
of his anti-hero Baldo, leader of the most notorious gang ever to appear in
Cipada, the disreputable city adjacent to Mantua. For Baldo, ”even a brief hour
seems like a hundred…until once again he can sample diabolical deeds.”
Nested within the poem - and a clue to Folengo’s aims - is a
story concerning Cipada’s search for a poet to represent the city in the same
way that nearby Pietole boasts of hometown poet-hero Virgil. Alas, Zeus,
petitioned by the envoy sent by Cipada to bring back such a poet, instead
dispatches the ambassador to the kitchen, where he finds the narrator of the
poem, Merlin Cocaio, a poet who rejects the loftiness of Homer and Virgil in
favor of awarding “the first prize in macaroni” to the citizens of Cipada.
I felt a twinge of disappointment at the narrative’s descent
from the spectacular Macaronic heights of its first pages, and though these are
quickly followed by a sumptuously detailed feast featuring a remarkable pronouncement
on the merits of various wines, it would be admittedly difficult for any writer
to keep up something as gloriously over-the-top as that pastafarian Willy
Wonka-style valley of Macaroni. The first volume focuses largely on Baldo’s origins,
youth and the development of his rampaging gang. Curiously, as in Orlando
furioso, the hero himself disappears for a long stretch, languishing in
jail while his companions spend years figuring out how to spring him (Baldo disappears
again on occasion later in the poem, passing out like a narcoleptic and missing
key battles).
The dividing point for the two volumes seems as much
stylistic as plot-driven: the gang’s flight from Cipada coincides with the kooky
imaginativeness of the narrative picking up considerably, playing out in an increasingly
screwball series of fantastic battles between Baldo’s gang and various
representatives of the underworld and unfolding in a flickering, chaotic chiaroscuro of light and dark, interior
and exterior, surfaces and depths. Most of these conflicts take place on and in
a whale covered with forests, mountains and wildlife that Baldo and his
companions have mistaken for an island. There’s a deadly fight involving wild
bears and a witch, followed by larger battles between the Cipada crew and the
denizens of Hell, access to which is gained through a door on the whale. Baldo also
discovers (still on the whale) a grand hall in which simulacra of the great
knights and heroes of the ages are seated around a banquet table, odd ghostly
doubles of their physical selves. After conquering Beelzebub and his legion of
demons, the group undergoes full confession (except for the centaur accompanying
them, who only confesses from his human half “because where he sinned with his
equine parts, there is no blame”), then, using a giant, magical ruby for
illumination, they proceed to scour the underworld, dispatching a vast army of
witches in a cavern beneath the sea and then heading lower to pursue Lucifer,
whom they’ve previously encountered. Coming around again to the culinary axis
around which Baldo revolves, the story ends with the gang half-mad, drifting
into and out of fantasy and enclosed in a great, hollowed-out pumpkin in which
they find for company most of the world’s thinkers and writers. I’ve scarcely
begun to touch on the poem’s nuttiness.
Baldo possesses an explosive energy and playfulness
that rarely lags and often overtakes any effort at philosophy. Asides attacking
the clergy, lawyers, and civil authorities see light but never fully develop,
as Folengo seems all too eager to turn his poem into the literary equivalent of
a comic action flick. Battles are relayed in a crackling prose – one almost
expects to see “Blam!” and “Pow!” rendered graphically as in TV’s Batman - and it’s easy to imagine the
poem being read aloud to a gape-mouthed audience hanging blow-by-blow on every
adventure. The poem’s low humor is often laugh-out-loud funny, its pranks and gags
leaving one feeling that in such humor there’s nothing new under the punch-drunk
sun. For example early in the second volume, Boccalo, a clowning member of the
group, convinces another character to search Baldo’s chest, from which the astonished
man, in a terrific Harpo Marx bit,
“extracts all sorts of stuff…a bulb, a mirror, an inkwell, a bell, a
shard of a plate, a bridle, part of a truss and the bits of candle which are
left for the altar boy to gather after Mass.” Some of the ruses played by Baldo
and his merry band of delinquents consist of malicious practical jokes ending
in death or injury, but others have an irresistible, ribald humor. In one such
scam, Baldo’s closest accomplice Cingar dupes another character into selling
vats of human waste disguised during the sales “training” period with a
deceptive layer of honey. In a scene later borrowed by Rabelais, Baldo and his
companions, fleeing Italy on a ship filled with three thousand sheep and their
shepherds, commandeer the vessel when Cingar concludes a deal to purchase one
of the sheep then promptly tosses it overboard, causing all the other sheep to leap
after it into the sea.
Such hijinks are often accompanied by lyrical flights of
imagination, as in the above scene when the narrator’s eye follows the sheep
into the depths:
At the time of the great flood, fish
crisscrossed the woods up in the high treetops and cavorted happily in the elms
and poplars, looking down at the meadows and flowers. And now a wooly flock
feeds on algae under the waves and against its will eats, drinks, and drowns.
The humor also comes from Folengo’s (and Mullaney’s) inventive
knack for comic detail. The setting sun “has such a big red face now that it
looks…as though it has just guzzled a barrel of Corsican wine.” An old man’s
“big nose drips like an alembic.” Zambello, the character duped into selling feces,
is “denser than a bowling ball and about as sharp as a garlic pestle.” A large ruffian named Lancelot (alternatively
Lunchalot due to his gluttonous tendencies) possesses a “tiny head” that “rests
on hunched shoulders, and doesn’t look like his own, but like one he rented.”
Berta, chased by an angry neighbor attempting to scorch her with flaming flax,
“doubles the speed of her zigzag running, like a half-tame cat whose tail is
tied to a pig’s bladder with three or four dried beans in it… always pursued by
that bladder and thinks that someone is chasing it.” Sometimes these accounts
develop into extended riffs, as when Cingar holds forth in a loony, lengthy paean
to the seasons, with Spring depicted as a naughty boy in underpants and Autumn
as a couple who drink and dance themselves into slumber while,
Watching over these naked ones while
they rest, snorting like pigs, are a thousand naked putti. They sing ‘Hey, ho, Bacchus!’ and dance and perform morescas, the pudgy little dears, and
perhaps are suitable and fitting for a stew. Each one crowns his curly head
with a leafy vine; each holds in his hands bunches and clusters of grapes; each
has a small flask with a little dangling spout. They prance, laugh and
celebrate their father’s bacchanals; there, beneath the grape-laden vines, they
themselves get drunk. The mother is drunk, the father is drunk, the children
are drunk; thus, all of them are drunk and pant with gaping throats.
There’s no shortage of absurdity, including a scene
half-Pinocchio and half-Gogol in which Cingar’s nose, having been lightly touched
by a passing witch, grows to such enormous proportions that it can be wrapped
around his neck like a scarf.
Baldo also rewards with the unusual precision Folengo
can use in describing the life of his time. Historians of everyday life could
mine quite a bit from the poem’s references to medical treatments, clothing, crafts,
music, politics, jokes and pranks, witches’ concoctions, the various winds that
blow across the Mediterranean, and, especially, kinds of foods and wines (and
their effects - readers may be cautioned
to watch out for “the hangover of Rome,” a wine from Somma that causes people
“to walk crooked”).
The cumulative effect of Baldo’s bristling, cockamamie tales
is an atmosphere of unfettered delirium and a vibrant, rousing anti-manifesto
aimed at jettisoning rules, convention, pretension, authority and anything that
stands in the way of bawdy fun. Recognizing that “what a man really is…an air
bubble and a whirligig spun by the faintest wind, kindling to fire, snow to the
sun, frost to the heat,” Baldo and his companions seize the day, picking
fights, running scams, inventing endless caprices, indulging in drunken,
gastronomic adventures, and leading a defiantly irreverent life. Rarely have I encountered literature in which human
pride has been brought so low with such ebullient comic energy - and with so much delightful
pasta fazool.
