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.
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