"In this book, Love emerges from confusion even as, in the description of the ancient poets, he sprang from the womb of Chaos. And although it is many years old, and of an earlier date than all my others, it is eminently youthful in appearance and hopes to please like a thing newmade." --Torquato Tasso (1544-95).

'The bitter tragedy of human life- horrors of death, attack, retreat, advance, and the great game of Destiny and Chance. ' In The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata, 1581), Torquato Tasso set out to write an epic to rival the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unlike his predecessors, he took his subject not from myth but from history: the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The siege of the city is played out alongside a magical romance of love and sacrifice, in which the Christian knight Rinaldo succumbs to the charms of the pagan sorceress Armida, and the warrior maiden Clorinda inspires a fatal passion in the Christian Tancred. Tasso's masterpiece left its mark on writers from Spenser and Milton to Goethe and Byron, and inspired countless painters and composers. This is the first English translation in modern times that faithfully reflects both the sense and the verse form of the original. Max Wickert's fine rendering is introduced by Mark Davie, who places Tasso's poem in the context of his life and times and points to the qualities that have ensured its lasting impact on Western culture. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

"In this book, Love emerges from confusion even as, in the description of the ancient poets, he sprang from the womb of Chaos. And although it is many years old, and of an earlier date than all my others, it is eminently youthful in appearance and hopes to please like a thing newmade." - Torquato Tasso Torquato Tasso (1544-95), the renowned author of the epic, "Gerusalemme liberata," and of the pastoral drama, "Aminta" (Italica Press, 2000), was also a great and prolific lyric poet. When he was still in his teens, he fell in love with Lucrezia Bendidio, a noted beauty and singer at the court of Ferrara, and wrote the first one-hundred-and-twenty of his five hundred love poems for her. These lyrics, collected as "Rime Amorose," Book One, by Tasso's nineteenth-century editor, Angelo Solerti, are here restored to the order that Tasso himself gave them when he oversaw Francesco Osanna's 1591 edition, which he considered definitive. Max Wickert has edited the Italian texts, with his new English verse translations on facing pages. In his Introduction, he outlines the process of Tasso's successive rearrangements and analyzes some of the key themes in these poems. The poems themselves are accompanied by detailed explanatory notes, including a selection of those made by Tasso himself. Critical acclaim for Max Wickert's "The Liberation of Jerusalem" "Wickert's is a remarkable achievement....The translation is consistently faithful to almost every detail of the content and] successfully recreates much of the distinctive structure of Tasso's language and its complex interrelation with the metre." - David Robie, "Times Literary Supplement" "Wickert's fine translation captures both the dignity and the energy of Tasso's epic, its artfulness and its passion." - Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2002 "I would have guessed from Max Wickert's sonnets that his handling of ottava rima would be strong and fluent. As indeed it is. I can't imagine a translation reading any better: everywhere easy, natural, idiomatic, taking the demanding rhyme scheme with no strain at all. A great 'read.'" - John Frederic Nims, former Editor, "Poetry" (Chicago) About the Editor and Translator: Max Wickert is the author of several volumes of verse and of "The Liberation of Jerusalem," a rhymed translation of Tasso's "Gerusalemme liberata," published by Oxford University Press in 2009. He has taught for many years at the University at Buffalo, NY. First English translation. Dual-Language Poetry. Introduction, chronology, bibliography, notes, appendices, first-line index. 294 pages.