The Unquiet Grave: Maírtin Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust

There’s a strain of literature that aims to be morally uplifting and instructive, a primer for improvement of self and others. Irish writer Maírtin Ó Cadhain’s blackly funny Cré na Cille, or The Dirty Dust, most assuredly does not belong to it.

Ó Cadhain’s 1949 “novel,” long praised but little read due its having been written in Irish vernacular, has appeared at last in English translation. The wait has been worthwhile. The Dirty Dust is a striking piece of mid-20^th century literature, one that can fit comfortably among the great works of the period. All comfort ends there, though, as The Dirty Dust poses several challenges. Even rendered into English its language contains a plethora of vernacular words and neologisms. Furthermore, the work consists entirely of dialogue, with no explicit indication of speaker. And the speakers in The Dirty Dust are legion, because they are also dead. The setting is “The Graveyard.” The time is “For Ever.”

The Dirty Dust is hardly the first work to feature a cast of the dead; one thinks of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, even Dante’s The Divine Comedy. But rather than speaking from beyond the grave, the characters in The Dirty Dust speak from directly within it. For all the buzzing inactivity that goes on in this graveyard of a small Connemara town, there’s little in the way of metaphysics; these dead are dead, in their dead bodies, in their wooden coffins. Their voices speak from the separate cavities into which they’ve been laid, although in a darkly comic turn Ó Cadhain reveals - to his characters’ double mortification - that inept or hasty undertakers have sometimes put bodies in the wrong graves or piled them atop one another to save space. Eternity in Dante’s inferno could hardly be worse than in Ó Cadhain’s cemetery, as here the newly dead, expecting to have passed on to a better world, instead find themselves in a static hell of gossip and chatter among the villagers who’ve gone before them. If one imagines one’s worst-ever holiday family meal stuck on eternal loop, it might be something like this.

Ó Cadhain’s graveyard denizens are a carping crowd: gossipy, cutting, resentful, insular:

There isn’t any chance to get away here, or to talk about culture…they are always talking about small stupid insignificant stuff here…cards, horses, booze, violence…Nobody has a snowball’s chance in hell of developing their intellect here…

Their voices overlap and interrupt. They emerge suddenly and, just as suddenly, fall quiet. At times they seem far off, at times nearby. Plot scarcely exists. Much of the sense of the story lies between the lines, unspoken. Gradually patterns and persons begin to emerge from this cacophony, usually recognizable through fixed, monotonous obsessions with particular subjects - not infrequently astonishment at having died: at failed kidneys, a heart having given out, a knife thrust through the ribs. But there are also conflicts over football, money, property, betrayals of word and of love. The same class and power differences, recriminations and enmities that existed above ground have migrated below it.

Caitriona Paudeen, the unpleasant central “character” of the novel, speaks first. Just buried, she wonders whether she’s been put in the Pound graveyard or only the Ten Shilling. Her self-interrogation has barely begun when she begins to hear, with a shock, nearby voices, then suddenly a chaotic chorus.

- Christ’s cross protect me! - Am I alive of dead? Are the people here alive or dead? They are all rabbiting on exactly the same way as they were above the ground! I thought that when I died that I could rest in peace, that I wouldn’t have to work, or worry about the house, or the weather, that I would be able to relax…But why all this racket in the dirty dust?

The small ambit of Caitriona’s ruminations and her graveyard companions’ reactions to them reveal her bitter family situation. A despised sister Nell still lives in the village. Another sister, Baba, has long been away in America, holding a will that Caitrionia, whose death has done nothing to halt her avarice, obsessively hopes will accrue entirely to her son Patrick, a ne’er do well pulling a string of bad marriages. Bitter and vituperative towards all, Caitriona gets as bad as she gives, as her fellow dead voice their own resentments and grievances against her. Part of the comedy of The Dirty Dust comes from Caitriona’s discovery at nearly every turn that her view of herself is not shared by those around her, each new revelation making her so sputteringly incensed that she wants to “burst.”

Caitriona’s neighbors, her mother-in-law, Nell’s husband, the postman, the pub owner, a shopkeeper, the town thief, a murderer and his victim whose conflicting political views continue on into death now that they’ve found themselves buried side-by-side – these are but a few of the cemetery’s dead, their ranks swelling with each new arrival. There’s the town’s former schoolmaster, who entertains his fellow corpses once a week by reading a romantic novelette (Two Men and a Powder Puff, among other tawdry titles). A former student exploits the opportunity of an eternal captive audience to recite her multiplication tables to her teacher to show that she’s finally mastered them (she has not). A French voice inscrutably inserts itself among the Irish until we learn that it’s a pilot who, having crashed into the sea and been buried among the villagers, mutters continually in French about the uncomprehending Irish: “Ils m’ennuient.” Standing out from the others, a disembodied, intermittent “Trumpet of the Graveyard,” begins most of the novel’s ten chapters by making lyrical pronouncements concerning the inevitability and universality of death, providing momentary relief from the relentless prattle. And of course, to ramp down The Dirty Dust into deeper depths, there is an unnamed writer, deceased “suddenly from an attack of writer’s cramp.” He picks impatiently at the “hackneyed” phrases of his neighbor in the tomb, an illiterate traditional storyteller, urging him to blow the “dirty froth” off his stories and get to the pint beneath, and occasionally offering dubious pronouncements about writing:

It’s the duty of every Irish speaker to find out if he has the gift of writing, especially the gift of the short story, plays, poetry…These last two are far commoner than the gift of the short story, even. Take poetry, for example. All you have to do is to start at the bottom of the page and to work your way up to the top…either that, or scribble from right to left, leave a huge margin, but that ain’t half as poetic as the other way.

Topics of conversation in The Dirty Dust, infused with a near constant and often acridly funny mediation on death, possess a strong Irish flavor, with references to the IRA’s struggles, political leaders such as Éamon de Valera, and unmistakably Irish aspects of life such as wakes and pubs. With less overt Irishness, Ó Cadhain’s work might resemble a play by Samuel Beckett: characters gabbing in the dark, isolated in their tombs like Nell and Nagg in their dustbins in Endgame, discovering things that happened when they were alive to which they weren’t privy and anticipating the next new burial to learn about their own funerals, the dispensation of wills and other matters that have continued on without them.

The language in Alan Titley’s translation burns along the pages. Anyone looking for a catalog of insults need look no further, as the opprobrium bandied about among the dead surpasses anything Mère and Père Ubu might have hurled at one another: “clap of crap,” “fly’s fart;” “poxy shitmonkey,” “pouncy microphallus,” “perfect pustule of the plebian pricks.” “I’m screaming at you for the last hour and you take no notice of me no more than if I was a slobber of frog spawn,” complains one.  What the ungrateful dead wish upon one another and upon the living is equally scathing: “May he get the death rattle of Slimwaist Big Bum! The decrepit diseases of the Hag of Beare!...His knees explode! His rump redden with rubenescence! Be lanced by lice!”

Ó Cadhain’s linguistic versatility and humor manage to keep 300 pages of this from seeming as eternal as it is for the dead. Beneath the dirt, few demonstrate much self-awareness, nor - despite underground efforts to hold an election and organize a rotary club - any more movement and change than during the largely self-absorbed, egoistic lives they apparently led prior to interment. One constantly yearns for the dead to surmount their petty concerns, discover something meaningful to talk about, shut up and realize that they’re dead. But their concerns rarely go beyond wanting to know if a cross of Connemara marble has been erected over their tombs.

Just beyond the dusty halo of grumbling graveyard conversation, though, is a hint of greater events. Despite the explicit “For Ever” indicated as temporal setting, a discernible timeframe emerges around all the talk. Through the graveyard’s self-proclaimed first arrival, a young soldier lost to the First World War, one ascertains that Caitriona’s burial takes place approximately 1939. Other references suggest a scope for the conversation paralleling World War II. The voices refer frequently to the “new” conflict up above; recent arrivals argue over Hitler; the young solider must repeatedly be corrected that “The War Between the Two Powers” hasn’t simply continued.

Curiously, much of the war news filtering into the dirt and dust seems distilled through the writer, who in addition to fixedly trying to formulate a short story - “The Sun Set,” “Another Sunset,” “Sundown,” “The Setting Sun” or a like variation - is proud of having written a collection of poetry entitled, provocatively, “The Yellow Stars.”  He serves as a target for reactionary outrage at the “disgusting lowdown mind” that could write such “Joycean gunge” and at having insulted Irish saint Colm Cille (several voices urge wretched tortures upon him). But the complexity of his role is deepened during idle gossip about the washing of a corpse covered in tattoos of swastikas, which seems to belong to the writer. Is his the voice that’s been interjecting praise of Hitler? Regardless, small-mindedness as regards the monstrousness of the war is conveyed in Caitriona’s assertion that the graveyard has become “worse than those places the Frenchie was yacking on about the other day: Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau.”

In this palpable presence of the war’s horror – and most evidently in the novel’s coastal small town setting, narrative style, and voices from the dead – The Dirty Dust may claim as a close literary cousin Dylan Thomas’ “play for voices,” Under Milk Wood, which, though it appeared in print after The Dirty Dust, originated as a radio play broadcast in 1945 (Cré na Cille itself has been performed as a radio play, as well as turned into stage and film versions). But little of the intensely magical lyricism of Thomas’ play or of his rapturous affection for the beauty of his small town can be found among Ó Cadhain’s noisy, bickering dead. If Thomas’ intention in Under Milk Wood was to reveal, despite the war’s enormity, the evanescent beauty and preciousness of life, Ó Cadhain’s novel feels like a searing riposte, a portrayal of death as providing no respite, redemption or absolution. It’s as though O Cadhain has taken Under Milk Wood’s little village of Llareggub and, refusing the subtlety of Thomas’ joke, turned the town’s letters backwards to proclaim openly: “Bugger all!”  

And when, towards the end of The Dirty Dust, a neighbor gently admonishes Caitriona regarding her endlessly vicious and petty fixations, the words resonate like a condemnation of all that is mean, small and insular. “God will not forgive us,” warns Caitriona’s neighbor, perhaps a bit belatedly seeing where they find themselves. But given the interminable dirt dished among Ó Cadhain’s jabbering dead, no less mired in trivialities in death than in life, one would be hard put to argue.

"…nothing can be found more fun than this art" - The Macaronic Verse of Teofilo Folengo's Baldo

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.

"To convince you, and you alone, is all that I wish to strive for" - Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso

David Johnston's 1973 Ballantine Books cover for Orlando furioso 

- not the version I read.

A gently sinuous line, superimposed like the orbit of a satellite over a map[i] of the continents, traces the travels of Ruggiero, a courageous knight errant, who, a millennium before the first manned spacecraft, rides astride the back of a flying hippogryph, a winged half-lion, half-horse, to survey the world from Spain to China, from Japan to Paris. This voyage is but one of the many delightful surprises in Ludovico Ariosto’s 16^th century poem, Orlando furioso, and its deliberate internationalism but one remarkably modern element in Ariosto’s lightly satirical world of starkly bold, memorable characters; codes of courtesy and dignity; rich inventiveness; and philosophical musings on aspects of love. Across the entirety of its 39,000 lines, Ariosto’s work is unflaggingly fresh, good-hearted, and supremely entertaining.  

The sheer ambitiousness of the poem - Voltaire referred to it as “The Iliad, The Odyssey and Don Quixote all rolled into one” - creates an immense panorama of the 9^th century world in which Ariosto situates most of the action. At the historical heart of Orlando furioso is the battle to defend Charlemagne’s Christendom against the onslaught of Moors and Saracens, with depictions of key confrontations including the siege of Paris and the decisive battle at Poitiers. The poem ranges widely geographically and even, beyond Ruggiero’s stratospheric travels, to the moon. Ariosto also cuts broadly across cultures, amplifying and playing with hand-me-down versions of Anglo-Saxon, French and Italian romances and an enormous cast of historical and mythological figures from Greek gods to African kings, from Tristan and Iseult to the Arthurian legends, from the Icelandic sagas to Marco Polo’s travels. A glossary of locations and characters in the Oxford Press edition I read runs to nearly 60 pages. Christians from all corners of Europe, Saracens and Moors from North Africa and the Middle East, Indians, Nubians, Ethiopians, central Asians, Circassians, Nordic and Chinese princesses (Orlando’s great love, Angelica, hails from Cathay) - all come together here. Tales of courtly love, knightly challenges, and fierce battles of a frequently gruesome realism entwine with acts of magic, supernatural feats, enchanted castles and hideous sea serpents, and deliriously imaginative inventions. In addition to the lightening-fast flying hippogryph, there’s a cornucopia of magical arms, adornments and devices: a shield so brilliant that it temporarily blinds any who look at it; a horn that produces such a terrifying sound that even the bravest knights flee in terror; books of spells; a ring that deflects any and all magic; a castle that causes all who enter to perceive illusions.

The narrative centers on a primary cast of heroes and heroines joined by love and/or blood: Orlando, Ruggiero, Rinaldo, Marfisa, Bradamant, Astolfo.  Though the title implies Orlando’s centrality, he’s absent for much of the book, although his frenzy, the “furioso” of the title, indeed occupies its heart. Bereft of his senses due to complications of unrequited love, Orlando roams the world stark naked and filthy, attacking people at random and “lost to himself.” Fortunately for the fate of the western world, his friend Astolfo journeys to the moon, where all things lost on earth are to be found in a dizzying diversity of new guises, including an enormous mountain of liquid brains contained in vials. Here Astolfo locates Orlando’s lost wits (in a vial conveniently labeled “The wits of Orlando”), and returns them to Earth, but not before remarking the stupefying number of vials of partial wits, including some of his own, and more surprising, those of others on earth whom Astolfo mistakenly “had credited with having all their wits about them.”

The narrative style of Orlando furioso is both linear and divergent. After opening each of the poem’s 46 cantos with a philosophical reflection, usually on love, the narrator weaves together disparate narrative threads, periodically stopping mid-action to pick up another strand or apologize for a digression, always concluding each canto with a teaser that politely asks the reader to stick around for the next episode, and even, in one instance, suggesting that readers “skip this canto: it is not essential – my story is no less clear without it.” One almost wishes that all narrators could be so considerate. Despite the spacious immensity of the work and its nearly innumerable characters, Orlando furioso retains an intimacy thanks to this graciousness and amiability of its narrator (qualities shared by the narrator of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed some three centuries later). This thoughtfulness extends to the narrator’s acknowledging within the poem its many sources, particularly the historian Turpin, and occasionally admitting of and apologizing for lack of more precise knowledge of the events being reconstructed, a degree of humility refreshingly conveyed in the narrator’s aim:

He who travels far afield beholds things which lie beyond the bounds of belief; and when he returns to tell of them, he is not believed, but is dismissed as a liar, for the ignorant throng will refuse to accept his word, but needs must see with their own eyes, touch with their owns hands. This being so, I realize that my words will gain scant credence where they outstrip the experience of my hearers./Still, whatever degree of reliance is placed on my word, I shall not trouble myself about the ignorant and mindless rabble: I know that you, my sharp, clear-headed listeners will see the shining truth of my tale. To convince you, and you alone, is all that I wish to strive for, the only reward I seek.

**

A work with as grand and rich a scope as Orlando furioso can hardly be encompassed briefly, so I’ll just note two elements of the poem I especially appreciated: the manner in which Ariosto creates a remarkably tolerant and open-minded ethos around prescribed codes of behavior, and the poem’s notable feminism.

The code of honor that permeates Orlando furioso reveals itself in a myriad of guises. One is the priority given to individual heroism and character over cultural or even religious persuasion. The principals in the poem hail from different lands and different religious traditions. Ruggiero fights on the side of the Sultan, for instance, and though the ostensible moral core of the work may rest with the triumph of Christendom, Ariosto often celebrates the personal virtues of Christians and Muslims alike; by contrast, the larger theological battle is treated almost incidentally. Many times, out of personal loyalties and obligations, his characters fight for parties on opposite sides of their own ideologies. Only in the poem’s final pages are religious allegiances rather hurriedly herded into line by Charlemagne’s victory.

For all the considerable blood-splattering that occurs - for a work so spry and comical in tone, an awful lot of heads and limbs go flying - the narrator repeatedly distinguishes between honorable battle and the waste and horror of useless conflict. On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Astolfo is struck by Christian shrines having been “usurped by impious Moors” while “Europe is in arms and aches to do battle everywhere except where battle is needed.” Though there are terrible scenes of butchery on the battlefield, these contrast with the many honorable confrontations that consist of one-on-one challenges of arms, frequently instigated simply to test one’s skills and with no small amount of gaiety. As often as not, such clashes culminate in agreement by the adversaries to halt for the night and resume the next morning after passing a pleasant evening of convivial dining and drinking. Under chivalric governance, requests to participate in more critical battles such as the defense of Paris or other exigencies interrupt some of these fights. Valor and fairness are utmost in importance, and some 500 years before the Geneva Conventions, Ariosto’s narrator recognizes that not all is fair in war. This is most powerfully demonstrated in a ferocious “aside” concerning the invention of firearms:

Wicked, ugly invention, how did you find a place in human hearts? You have destroyed military glory, and dishounoured the profession of arms; valour and martial skill are now discredited, so that often the miscreant will appear a better man than the valiant. Because of you no longer may boldness and courage go into the field to match their strength./ Many a baron, many a knight now lies in earth, and so shall many more on your account, before this war is ended which has brought tears to all the world but most of all to Italy. I have said it, and I speak no lie: the man who invented such abominable contraptions was crueler by far than all the most evil of evil geniuses the world has known./ To his eternal punishment I believe that God must shut his cursed soul away in the blindest depths of hell, with Judas the accursed.[ii]

These codes, which extol personal courage and prowess, respect and tolerance, and a strong sense of justice, reveal Orlando furioso’s unabashed (albeit not entirely secular) humanism; despite the narrator’s frequent invocation of God, Christ is almost completely absent from the poem. Combined with the unusual universalism of the poem - a work in which, with a palpable poignancy, one can look back from the moon and just descry the “unilluminated” Earth – the qualities exalted by the narrator infuse the poem with an astonishing freshness and forward-looking modernity.

**

The poem’s feminism is another aspect of this freshness and modernity. Samuel Butler, in his 1897 book The Authoress of the Odyssey, argued that Homer’s epic had been written by a woman, but save for the historical record Butler might well have proposed a similar hypothesis for Orlando furioso. Ariosto’s poem frequently denounces the injustices directed towards women and contains a memorable cast of active, daring female characters who challenge and subvert accepted notions of courtly love and of gender.

While Ariosto ostensibly follows the staple pattern in romances of exalting and idealizing the virtues of women (the male knights errant are motivated almost entirely by pursuit and defense of lady loves worshipped from afar), many of the women of Orlando furioso are courageous fighters, astute tacticians and sexual libertines. Early in the work, a brave knight, after defeating another, dramatically whips off his helmet, and, with long tresses falling, reveals herself as Bradamant, an expert in combat. In a later scene, the skilled woman warrior Marfisa performs the same dramatic trick after winning escape for her shipwrecked colleagues from a matriarchal “city of killer women,” turned vengeful and murderous by the wrongs of men, and who send their strongest male slaves to battle with any hapless captives in a contest for their freedom.

Gender-masking and unmasking recur throughout the poem, with frequent instances of courageous women mistaken for male knights and other scenes in which men don female attire when it’s to their advantage. Most memorably, this last occurs in an amusing passage, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when Marfisa’s fraternal twin brother assumes his sister’s identity in order to take advantage of a young woman who has fallen head over heels for Marfisa under the initial assumption that she is a man, and is then driven nearly mad by frustratingly unfair rules of behavior that forbid her from loving a woman. This gender-swapping underscores the narrator’s conviction, often made explicit, that women are on par with men and deserve full equality. The poem repeatedly inveighs against this gender disparity, including protesting violence against women: “That a man should bring himself to strike a fair maiden in the face or break but a strand of her hair I take to be not merely a great wrong, but an act wrought against nature, an act of rebellion against God.” The narrator also underscores the unfairness of men who disparage women’s capacities and courage, or who would deny them pursuit of their own desires, as when Rinaldo denounces the double standard in matters of love:

If the same ardour, the same urge drives both sexes to love’s gentle fulfillment, which to the mindless commoner seems so grave an excess, why is the woman to be punished or blamed for doing with one or several men the very thing a man does with as many women as he will, and receives no punishment but praise of it?/ This unequal law does obvious injustice to women, and, by God, I hope to show how criminal it is that such a law should have survived so long.

There is even, in Ariosto’s poem, explicit notice of the way in which male writers dismiss the talents of women, and are “so eaten to the heart with malice and envy…that they must also take it upon themselves to disclose any blemishes in woman…as though the fair sex’s honour would cloud their own.” The narrator urges “ladies who incline to meritorious deeds” to “persist in following your bent; do not be deflected from your high calling by the fear of not being paid the honour due to you.”

**

The broad-minded receptivity of Orlando furioso, reinforced by the playful bantering tone of its narrator, embraces an optimal world that celebrates joy, desire, and lightness of heart, one where “dancing and play-time, and the hours went by in one continuous festivity. Grey-headed Thought could not dwell here in a single heart, not even for a moment.” Though such a world may be nearly unattainable in reality, Ariosto has supplied his readers its literary equivalent, a poem that, with such openness of spirit and amiable narration, and despite its length, one is sorry to see come to an end – the kind of book to make much other literature, regardless of period, seem stale, circumscribed and even retrograde by comparison.

---

[i] This map is one of two in Barbara Reynolds’ Penguin Books translation, which makes a helpful supplement to the Oxford Press translation by Guido Waldman upon which I principally relied. Waldman explicitly notes that his prose translation is an effort to focus on sense more than sound, a way of maneuvering around the plethora of rhyming word endings in the original Italian ottava rima. Reynolds’ attempt to keep to the rhyme scheme for Orlando’s 39,000 lines is nothing short of heroic. Switching back and forth between the two versions proved revealing and rewarding.

[ii] An interesting speech to bring to the table in a debate with a gun fetishist.