Jerusalem Delivered (Gerusalemme liberata)
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A01=Torquato Tasso
Anthony M. Esolen
Author_Torquato Tasso
Category=DCF
Category=FBC
Christian knights
Crusades epic
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_classics
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
First Crusade
Godfrey of Bouillon
Holy City
Italian Renaissance literature
Jerusalem Delivered
Muslim Saracens
Poetic translation
Torquato Tasso
Product details
- ISBN 9780801863233
- Weight: 794g
- Dimensions: 159 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 27 Oct 2000
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Late in the eleventh century the First Crusade culminated in the conquest of Jerusalem by Christian armies. Five centuries later, when Torquato Tasso began to search for a subject worthy of an epic, Jerusalem was governed by a sultan, Europe was in the crisis of religious division, and the Crusades were a nostalgic memory. Tasso turned to the First Crusade both as a subject that would test his poetic ambition and as a reflection on the quandaries of his own time. He sought to create a masterpiece that would deserve comparison with the great epics of the past. Gerusalemme liberata became one of the most widely read and cherished books of the Renaissance. First published in 1581, it was translated into English by Edward Fairfax in 1600. That translation has been the standard, even though Fairfax was only a good, not a great, poet. Fairfax tried to fit Tasso's verse into Spenserian stanzas, adding to and subtracting from the original and often changing Tasso's meaning.
Anthony Esolen's new translation captures the delight of Tasso's descriptions, the different voices of its cast of characters, the shadings between glory and tragedy-and it does all this in an English as powerful and clear as Tasso's Italian. Tasso's masterpiece finally emerges as an English masterpiece.
Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College. He is the editor and translator of Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, also available from Johns Hopkins.
