Torquato Tasso. Aminta.

Passaro, Maria C. Pastore

Ed. and trans. Charles Jemingan and Irene Marchegiani Jones. New York: Italica, 2000.

When Tasso wrote his Aminta he had no doubt that he had created a new pastoral genre. In the Renaissance the pastoral form (and its origin identifiable in the idylls and eclogues of Theocritus and Vergil), was used widely. Its tradition is by now familiar. One thinks of Boccaccio's Ameto, Poliziano's Favola di Orfeo, Guarino's Pastor fido, and Sannazaro's Arcadia. The impact of this mode throughout Europe was deep and in their "Introduction" to the present translation Charles Jerningan and Irene Marchegiani Jones appropriately do refer to its European popularity.

The novelty of Tasso's pastoral experiment lies in his ability to pull together several models: Petrarch's lyrical voice, Poliziano's political reflections in Orfeo and the Stanze per la giostra, the eroticism of the Arcadia. Tasso, who was philosophically alert to the implications of art and writing, epitomizes the spirit of his pastoral visionz in the famous dictum: "S'ei place, ei lice" (If it gives you pleasure, do it)--a dictum that encompasses Epicurean pleasure, a sense of natural freedom, and moral assent.

The present translation of Aminta provides the Italian text as well as the facing English translation. Jerningan and Marchegiani Jones wisely decided to "transmit" the Italian endecasyllabic blank verses into the ten syllables of the English iambic pentameter blank verses. The translation, while effective in its own right, follows the Italian closely enough that the text would become a useful tool for a reader with some knowledge of Italian who wants to sample the original. The facing page format facilitates this kind of reading. The book is prefaced by a series of brief introductions placing the Aminta in relation to members of the d'Este court, surveying the work's influence, and looking at the drama's literary analysis. The translation succeeds surprisingly well in communicating the flavor and the force as well as the meaning of the original. As example, let us turn to the famous lines by the Golden Age chorus arguing for free love, untouched by honor: "Coro--O bell'eta de l'oto / Non gia perche di latte / Sen'corse il fiume e stillo mele il bosco / Non perche i frutti loro / Dier da l'aratro intatte / Le terre, e gli angui errar senz'ira o tosco; / Non perche nuvol fosco / Non spiego allor suo velo, / Ma in primavera eterna, / Ch'ora s'accende e verna, / Ne porto peregrino / O guerra o merce a gli altrui lidi il pino; // Ma sol perche quel vano / Nome senza soggetto, / Quell'idolo d'errori, idol d'inganno, / Quel che dal volgo insano / Onor poscia fu detto, / Che di natura 'l feo tiranno, / Non mischiava il suo affanno / Fra le liete dolcezze / De l'amoroso gregge; / Ne fu sua dura legge / Nota a quell'alme in libertate avvezze, Ma legge aurea e felice / Che natura scolpi: S'ei piace, ei lice." ("Chorus--Oh, first fair age of gold /not just because streams ran / with milk, and trees the honeyed dew distilled; /not that the earth did mold /its fruit from unploughed land / and serpent roamed no ire nor venom filled; / no dark cloud ever chilled, / nor close to earth did cling; / the skies that now inflame / in an eternal spring; / and frigates never bore / to alien shores nor pilgrims, freight, nor war. // But just because that vain / abstraction empty word, / that erring idol of propriety--/ which was by folk, insane, / as Honor since referred--/ which tyrannizes now society, / mixed hot anxiety / with the happy joy / of loving's faithful band; / nor was its harsh command / known by those souls who liberty employed, / but nature's law of gold / And joy, do what pleases you, was told" [Act One, Scene Two, 320-44]).

From a scholarly point of view, this edition is marred by some bibliographical omissions. It would have helped the student who just enters the world of Tasso to be aware of traditional and authoritative understandings of the pastoral form (e.g., William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral or Renato Poggioli's Oaten Flute). Equally serious is the neglect of innovative crifical reflections on the pastoral such as those offered some thirty years ago by A. Bartlett Giamatti's Eartly Paradise, and, more recently, by Giuseppe Mazzotta's Cosmopoiesis. These lacunae notwithstanding, the present translation of Aminta is an intelligent, welcome addition to the Tasso shelf. Translations, like all works of art are exercises, trials and errors always in need of corrections, always necessary, and always provisional.

MARIA C. PASTORE PASSARO
Central Connecticut State University