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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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I can't tell you how many times I get asked the question and what's that have to do with Italian literature.
As if being a professor of Italian literature didn't have something to do with just about everything.
For those who know not only the letter but the spirit of its tradition, there is very little of any import that does not have something to do with the
Italian literature.
Professor of Comparative Literature, but now, Trist Vapid.
Professor of French and Italian Literature, I use that title occasionally mostly when I'm with French diplomats.
But as my good friend Anamadhi Anapoditano once said before she joined the giant family,
"It's so elegant Roberto when they introduce you as Professor of Italian Literature."
Anamadhi Anuha thing or two about flair, but apart from the elegance of it, for an intellectual, there is nothing.
But nothing that beats being a professor of Italian literature, as long as you get it that is and know what it is that you're professing.
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Italian departments in the United States tend to be minuscule, maladapted, and marginal.
In fact, they are among the most marginalized programs in the entire university, which is ironic given that the Italian literary tradition is absolutely central to the canon of the humanities and several other fields as well.
That tradition is like Orpheus, the poet of incantation who descended into the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, but who could not refrain from casting an anxious look backwards to see if she was behind him.
Against the express injunction of Pluto not to turn around until he had climbed back into the light.
Morning the second death of his twice lost wife, Orpheus, was impervious to the blandishments of other women, and one day he so frustrated a crowd of angry manads that they tore his body apart and dispersed his fragments across the land.
Something like that also happened to the body of Italian literature, which has been strewn here and there across the university.
Its Roman limbs are claimed by departments of classics, St. Francis belongs to religious studies, Dante Petrarch and Bocaccio, who form the matrix of British literature, are taught in translation in English departments.
Machiavelli, the founder of modern political theory, is under formaldehyde in political science departments.
Galileo belongs to physics, Leonardo, to the history of science, Michelangelo, to architecture and art history,
reviled into music, Antonioni, to film studies and so forth.
I taught a course just recently called Italian lyric poetry, the greatest hits which began with St. Francis and ended with the contemporary poet Fabrizio Falcone.
It was my most recent reminder that there is poetry, and then there is Italian poetry.
Or, as St. Dael once said about Parmesan, Idja live homage, I lupadmism.
Of the 40 or so poets we read over the course of the semester at least 35 times, I told myself that there's a fascinating dissertation to be written here,
even with a poet, as well known as Torquato Tasso, I had the feeling that as a sanitier he is still Tera Incognita, a continent of lyric poetry still waiting to be discovered.
You would think that if the English department at Stanford has 35 professors, which it does, then Italian should have at least 100 of them, but things don't work out that way.
We are three and a half professors in Italian, one for every ten faculty members in English.
But that's all right. We like it that way. It gives us the advantage of a low profile and allows us to hear all the more intimately the disembodied voice that mourns the white shoulder dueridacy.
I have with me in the studio the person who is by any measure the leading Italianist in the United States, Giuseppe Matsota, a professor of Italian literature, fully worthy of that appolation.
Professor Matsota is visiting us here at Stanford from Yale where he holds the title of Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian.
He is the author of many major books on Dante, on Bokacho on Petroc, on Vico, and on Renaissance Humanism.
I should mention that prior to going to Yale in 1983, Giuseppe taught Italian literature at Cornell University, where yours truly studied with him as a graduate student.
Indeed, I first met him when I was living La Dolcevita in Rome back in 1979 in the days when self-disappation and poetry went hand in hand, at least for me.
And one evening after Giuseppe told me, "I want you to come and work with me at Cornell."
A fellowship offer arrived in the mail. I said to myself, "Why not?" and took off the next year for Ithaca, New York.
I ended up writing a dissertation on Dante a few years after that with Professor Matsota and the rest is history.
Giuseppe, it's a real pleasure to welcome you on entitled opinions.
Thank you, and thank you. Good to be here. And I have been here before and then returning to this place.
It's really a little bit of nostalgia for me.
You mentioned Anamarina Puritano and your introductory remarks were a noble woman.
Noble woman, yeah, no longer with us, but now part of that orific nostalgia for both of us, I believe.
I made a few claims about the grandeur or the uniqueness of Italian literature.
I did that actually in a serious spirit, I have to say because I feel fully committed to it.
Is there anything about the tradition in general before we speak about specifics that you would like to say about the Italian literary tradition?
What's the specificity of this culture that you present the fragmented body of the culture?
That's true.
I don't want to take an nostalgic view of the past as something irretrievable or something that is long gone.
Now we are really in a mode of decadence. In fact, I will try to answer your question.
We could really talk about this question for the whole rest of the hour.
But what's the specificity of Italian culture?
What does that make it a little bit different from all others?
That's a very good question. I could mention two or three elements.
One can say that Italian culture is the only Western culture which systematically addresses issues of the classical tradition within which Italian culture is rooted and the biblical component, the biblical stream, and makes one of the standpoint, the perspective, for the critique of the other.
This is true from the time of Danton and all the way down to Filene and Pazolene and all the others.
Going through Tasso, you mentioned Tasso, Vee Come and Zoni. This is really the heart of Italian tradition.
Another aspect that you touch with this whole idea of how Italian is the dismembered body, the department.
It is a sense that's part of... it's a... it was assimilated, that it's part of its success.
It's... Italian is no longer a view that some kind of other that you have to study as a mystery and anigma and etc.
I think it's the encyclopedism of Italian culture. You write, you've touched on that, that there is the architecture.
And these activities were always and have always been in conversation with each other.
So in fact, I think that encyclopedism is the only way to approach the challenges of Italian culture.
And I can talk about other things. I think that the thing that really gives a unity to and the specificity to Italian culture is really Rome.
As you know, I know that you wrote one of your splendid books, it was exactly Rome and the whole myth of Rome.
But you know, I always say that most people, the geographers will tell you that Rome is that city in Italy.
And if you believe geographers, that's true, but I think that it's the other way around.
It is that country which is in Rome. And I think that the global, the story of the universality of Rome is actually, has actually become the characteristic of Italian culture.
At the cultures, I really have to qualify this as a bit. Of course in France, you have episodic moments of the classical world.
It's rooted in Latin and the classical tradition. But lastly, because they call it a moment of it.
Spain, England, English literature, of course, they call it the classical period.
But in Italy, this Roman temptation for better and for worse has always been with us.
It's an extraordinary, extraordinary thing.
And you mentioned that the classicism is in a kind of relationship with the biblical, or to say the Christian.
Yes. And it's often a tense relationship, would you agree?
Absolutely. I think that the reason history of Rome, 1929, the Italian state finally signed the agreement with the Vatican in order to really make the Italian Catholics part of the political life of the country.
And they open up via the La Conceolierte honor, which is all a program, reconciliation between church and state.
But when Mussolini was marching down, he really began celebrating the whole idea of the pagan Roman past, which of course for the churchmen, the whole reconciliation, something altogether different.
But in the culture of throughout the history of Italian whether it's Petra, it's Dante, the Neoplatanists of Renaissance, so yeah, that's clearly a tense relationship.
Is it all to be?
Can I ask a specific question here about Dante and Petra in their appropriation of the classical, we know that the divine comedy is as extraordinarily Christian poem, but which rescues or re-retrives the whole classical world within its, you know, within its mon.
And Dante's relationship to Virgil is very significant and there's a lot of pathos involved there, but not only Virgil, a number of other poets as well, many of them in limbo.
The common wisdom is that between Dante and Petra who is often considered the father of Renaissance humanism, that the attitude towards antiquity has undergone a significant change, if not a revolution.
And Petra's relation to the ancients is not what Dante's relation to the ancients was, do you agree with that?
Well, I agree with that, but I think that I would emphasize the agreement, the amount of agreement between Dante and Petra.
Take it, you mentioned that two of them, one point, a common point of reference is really a santa-gastin reading, santa-gastin reading of Rome.
And it's clear from the city of God whether you read the sections on Varro in the two great books of the city of God, book five and book six, which is a extraordinary critique of the ideology of the empire, barro being the librarian of Caesar, etc.
Or you go on reading the larger polemic with the Virgilian Empire, both for different reasons, but Dante and Petra disagree with a gastin.
For one, there is such a thing as the empire, for the other, there is the empire of culture.
The longer shares, the values of the political values that Dante really agreed to and then doors, the imperial Rome, the supernational state that could organize and thereby contain competing national interests.
But the other one really has a new project, a really more than project of how culture, shaped by Roman values, could become the culture for the Renaissance.
So you remember in your book on Petra that there is a splendid passage there about Petra being the first real tourist in the sense that he goes to Rome and sees Rome as a place of ruins and of a past which is really other in a way that perhaps it was not so for Dante, who maybe believe that there was more continuity between his era and the people.
That is true. I probably would have to, I can't remember the paragraph here, you have an amazing recall, but I'm sure that some other paragraph in my book, I do mention that
the Renaissance look take the famous speech Petra gives from the capital Hill, the same place when they grant him the famous Laurel Crown.
He's so aware that the Royal Crown crown in Rome has stopped being distributed ever since the time of a division who gave it to a thinker, was spacious, but he goes on, making a speech that literally recalls
Cicero, Cicero's own speeches from the capital, so the continuity, the spiritual continuity between Petra and Roman and Tiguite, Roman, the culture of Roman and Tiguite is probably more pronounced than it is in the case of Dante.
Dante really saw a continuity in the fact, in the reality of history, the Empire was then, and now it's an empire now that ought to be legislated and viewed in its autonomy, now this was the whole argument of Monarchy.
And this does not mean that some people could have true jump and say, "Well, they're really less theological, they're both deprief theological, the theology doesn't mean one thing."
And so it does not mean only the Augustinian take on it.
In the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance was completely easy.
It's not "totological."
Yes, it is, to a certain extent, but "totology" can help clarify something, the ancients were the foundation for certainly the civic humanists,
and they own out of the Bruni Coluchos, Santo Dazzi, and Roberto Roci, and all these people who were such great champions above all the Roman republic, if not the Roman Empire unlike Dante, but it's something that continues, as you mentioned in your opening salvo all the way through, certainly in the early modern period.
Giuseppe, we decided before coming on air that we would like to talk a little bit about the tradition of the Italian epic in particular Adoos, and Tasso,
that was my understanding, yes.
But I can't resist before we turn to the epic to ask you just briefly about the lyric tradition, because I mentioned this course I taught recently, and I was again astonished at how incredibly inexhaustible Lee Rich is the entire tradition.
And how many people who we don't necessarily think of primarily as poets wrote sonnets as part of their activity?
But you were mentioning that I agree with your judgment, so you were mentioning the Tasso as a lyrical poet, he's extraordinarily extraordinary.
I think he is probably the one who queried him, queried him was of course a little party, and without the lyrical poetry of Tasso,
they would be no, no, no, no party.
And I think also Pascoli, with his phonosimbalism and this kind of, it's amazing to read Pascoli about three weeks after we read Tasso, because we were going at a very fast clip, and Tasso was clearly the, you know, the forerunner of Pascoli.
He's extraordinarily, in fact, I think that that would be an appeal to some of your friends, the great poets, you know, to turn to, because he really needs a good translator.
There are people who are translating him into an impromptu prose, and that's not enough.
That's because if you read him thematically, he seems to be, you know, the variations are wars and the few details here and there, but not thematically, it tends to be.
And even this Eve, you know, to think that he's a patron of poets and he isn't.
So turning to the epic, we have a very long and rich tradition in the Italian poochy and boyad, though, but we don't have time to discuss them.
We really want to talk about two of the main epic writers after Dante, which would be Adios, the author of the Orlando Fudios or Tasso, the Jedduzalimélie Barata.
I don't know which of the two deserves the crown. I really don't have so many years. You know the story. Can I interrupt to you?
Yes.
I know that you want to ask very specific questions of what your readers are so intellectual, but this is a little aside.
The famous battle, I mean, in the Renaissance, which was the great poet, Tasso, the Rioso, and two guys come to blows for us and then the duel to decide, you know, by the power of the duel, the ordeal,
which the two is two poets' better, one wounds mortally, the other, and is about to die and they just with the solace sizes.
Gee, but I never read either of them.
The arguments, you know, they'd add something about the species, the Italian spirit, the comical elements of the Italian intellectual tradition, all the time present.
All the time. Much more in Aetioso than Tasso, I would say. Yes. Yes. Yes. And if we're talking about crowns, so I did a show recently on the symposium with Andrea Nightingale in that dialogue, alcibieties crashes the party and it comes to crown Agothon.
But when he notices that Socrates is sitting next to Agothon, he says, "I can't crown one and not the other, so he divides the crown and crowns them both."
So I would do the same. That's great.
So you mentioned the comic elements. Let's talk first about Aetioso. I believe Pédándello has this beautiful and pretty well-known essay called "Humorism" and for Pédándello, Aetioso is almost like the paragon of a humoristic literature which is on the one hand, it's comic, but at the same time there's a deadly seriousness in the comedy.
Yeah. I would agree. For our listeners who haven't read the Orlando Fudioso or might not know a lot about Aetioso, what kind of epic is the Orlando Fudioso which translated means Roland Gondmad?
Gondmad, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. God crazy because of love.
Well, it's a first of all, it's a poem. Of course, you were recalling the genealogy of the epic tradition. You mentioned Pudg and Bojard.
I really think that the poet of foundations in every sense in Italian, they tallied the foundation of the epic itself is Bojard.
They are all picking up one element which comes from the grand impact of Western history, the trauma of Western history, the song of Roland and the defeat of Christianity because of the hubris of Roland.
So that the Muslim Christian confrontation keeps obsessing them and they all return to it. So that's Bunchy who is an extraordinary poet and maybe if we are not here debating you and I of which the two Pataso are used as the better poets, maybe we should consider giving the crown to Bunch,
the extraordinary poet who writes a divine comedy in every sense of the comical that I think Pudam dello is talking about.
Bojard is the one who reinvents the genre in the sense that he starts by saying, "Tirpin has given the whole story about Roland, but a great order is."
But he omitted something out of fear that the reputation of Roland could be somehow diminished the story of his madness, of love, mad for love. That's really what I want to tell the story.
Everybody that follows starts writing in effect romance epics in the belief that the story, the love story, the story of romance, the story of the absorption of the mind, the lyricism, the mind in itself.
It really is the matrix of the epic, meaning the historical involvement of the hero. And Alioso picks that up, but picks that up exactly from Bojard.
So, it's an epic romance, I would call it just to answer your question directly.
The great grand theorists around Fernlada, they all write in Fernlada, Fernlada, why Fernlada would be another long paragraph, actually open, and I won't.
So, we have in Bojard, though a rewriting of the traditional Christian epic of the Song of Roland, and he introduces the romance element into it.
And it's almost like a little digression or a parenthesis about Roland falling in love.
And this poem, the Bojard, though this poem, which is called the Orlando ena mo rato, Roland in love, it ends, it's actually not finished.
It ends abruptly in because of the invasion of Italy by the French forces, and Bojard, though, says, as long as the real armies are coming into my country and invading it, I feel like I can't go on writing this poem, which,
Can I sit there in Italian, it stands in the last stands, a famous last stands, main trick you can to, or a dear or an entour, red or Italian, tout, infian, a local, perquesti galle, kegongran valure, vein gona per di sertarnon so que l'oco, pervilash, en questo varnamore, the fjordis pea narden te poco poco,
"Nautre chiaeta" is a beefier contrast, so "racantaro vil tu perespresso."
And I should really explain with other readers who I'm sure know Italian, in, you know, very well, regardless of what you, your preliminary marks were about.
What has happened is that Charles VIII of France, in 1494, invades Italy.
Bojardo hears the news and he stops an additive.
The scene that precedes this scene of this lesbian love between sure, the spina and in brother
man, perinins, and he's aware, he, Bojardo's aware, that's what Charles VIII has invaded Italy.
I start my story with France and Terpen, and almost comes for circle as if the myth of France is still hovering over the whole
bit. But what is he also saying is that history's realities are now entering the world that I have here conjured up.
And he says, "I hope this is an interruption, but maybe it's not an interruption."
He plays to God a kind of deus ex machina, but he knows that this intervention, divine intervention, this time, won't work.
And so it's the tragedy, the historical tragedy of Italy, the lack of virtue in the land, the sacralage of the invasion.
He visits a great irony of that line, the invaders, the French invaders, the think they have valor, and they will make a desert out of this land.
And they want to call it peace, of course.
And it just says, "I'm going to leave you with the vain love, so few of the subpoena, which means the flower of the flower of the thistles. But we are going to believe the thistles."
Don't, yes.
We're going to really create the explosion of such, we're going to really create the creta of the souls.
And that's the end of the war.
And I look at that word, "deserta" is that they're going to create a desert, almost as if they're going to go into the very space of the imaginative literature, which in these epics is the forest, and create out of the forest a desert and make an render this kind of imaginative literature impossible.
But let me just say that that's great, especially when it comes to a rioso, but of course the world of Vodaso, it's the world that takes the action, takes place in the desert in front of Jerusalem.
And in that sense it really picks up the desert of Dante in Exitu, Israel, the Giptans, so the desert really is the space of Epiphanes, the space of laws, so the space of wandering.
It's had for the two major religious poets of the Italian intellectual tradition, but with no doubt, with the rioso, you're absolutely.
So if Boyad, though, is in some sense the, it's the father poem of the Orlando Fudioso of Varyosto, and if Varyosto is, he's like a son on a mission to redeem the unfinished business of his own poetic father.
And he continues this poem, and he adds another twist to it that is not just Roland in love, it's Roland who has gone completely insane.
But in family connections with Bico and the whole Neoplatonic movement, and he also has a chance, so there's a lot of neoplatodism going on, but I also has a chance to really reflect critically on this whole, the madness, the scene of the worth the worth of men.
And Rioso is a poet who links more than Boyad, I think, Rioso is a great thinker.
Rioso is the other peculiarity of the Italian intellectual tradition, that the major thinkers are the poets, so that the whole idea of rhetoric and philosophy, which is so debated even in the 19th century, 20th century, unless you go on and text seriously a guy that I really like, middle up until you understand how the history of the world and the philosophy.
Like Vico.
But there are these, this, I also say, an ex-hold, an extraordinary thing, his poem really puts forth one major theme, "Flateral Variations".
We are in a labyrinth, not only we're in a labyrinth when we're in the Orlando Frioso, the poet would do everything he can to lose us along the way.
We have always told wonder about our control, our ability to keep the threads of the story, but he has one overarching idea, and the overarching idea is the question about freedom, the red-rand renaissance myth, are we free, and then he discovers the pleasures of captivity.
So the heroes are always claiming freedom, someone is freeing them, and then immediately they lapse into the form of bonders.
This is an extraordinary poem, but to me this is the fundamental intellectual passion, Rioso.
Do you find in his focusing on themes of captivity or taking a traditional Christian hero and driving him insane out of love, that there are certain renaissance humanists myths of self possession, the rule of reason, the notion of the measure that all this is, yeah.
No, you're right, this is the primary target, Pico, Ficino, but also certain ideas about freedom, but he's a profoundly, you're rude to his the fact that you're saying that he takes a Christian hero, Orlando, Orlando, and double him in Renaldo, which of course is almost an imperfect animator.
He's a profoundly Christian poet, and I think there are all these efforts that have come from a very peculiar tradition in Italy coming, meaning this liberal, in the Talon sense of the word myth.
The scientists before him in the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, the Grosjean's wanted to try to make him into the radical skeptic of the Renaissance.
The way this is the fate to which even in surmantis was subjected, another profoundly religious spirit.
I think that has to be stressed, he is the target, the myths of self possession of the neo-platonic, philosophical tradition, which Pico etc.
But then there are also Luther, there is also Rasmus, there is Vailah himself with their own versions of what is freedom or is not freedom.
If your students or listeners want to go on reading this poem, there should be a tension to all these ideas, these fluctuations in the poem between freedom and bondage, bondage to love, to fate, duty.
And then you have brother Mante who always tries to freerodra once to say duze meruljero, with all this, because there is a sedational freedom, but there is a greater fascination exerted by the state of bondage and he explores this ecology of the two.
Can I ask about the geopolitical situation in Italy or in Europe at the time, and whether Adioso has also in mind the kings and princes that are engaging in a serious endless series of wars that don't have any grand purpose like the fight between the Christians and the Muslims, but are really like these knights who are lost in force and that they're just looking for adventure or looking for occasion.
And in a certain sense, looking for distraction, the way Pascal speaks about the need for diversion to relieve one's existential boredom.
And one of the things in the Odlande Furyoso, the denunciation of the invention of gunpowder and the firearm, the Makina Infernal or Infernal Makina, this idea that the means of destruction have been so enhanced through the invention of gunpowder, and that if the man who is in the
the genius through the invention of gunpowder, and that if the people who are in charge of the geopolitical events that take place are of a mentality as
Adioso's knights seem to be, then we're all in deep trouble because we're going to go on and on perpetuating conflicts more for the sake of our own distraction rather than real purpose.
And I think that from that point of view actually the very powerful insight is by Puchy who makes all these heroes, just toughies and vagrants who are the
man who leaves so and so, the fact is that they want a good meal, they are going to steal your money and they call it a gift and they go on.
This is the world upside down, it's an extraordinary kind of event.
But you write that there is a strong moral sense that comes with the attacks against items which are very traditional in Italian, Italian thought but also the
cousin, the donation of Constantine which too, he also is was for Dante, is was for Valle, is for cousin, it really means the kind of
the democratic temptation of the church to him, this is the cause of the real immorality that because the confusion and engenders it tells you that you need not at all keeping differences that there is really not a point and it's a contradiction in terms with the very, the very
a classical structure, the church on the one hand we have a universe of differentiations and rank ordering on the other hand, so now let's just make a hybrid and so he attacks all this.
So there's a moral voice at the same time, this is truly of because he takes the perspective of a Ferrari which becomes the metaphor,
a provincial town that doesn't have a chance in the world scene and so the irony is clear, look we think that we are so so important at court,
but the fact that the Christian and the Muslims are fighting and avoiding with each other, this is the vision.
It's very humorous, it's a digressionary kind of narrative, it's full of episodes and it's polycentric, it doesn't really have a center of action and it really madness is a center.
Or Lando was mad at the very center of the poem, but of course it's an anti-center because it destabilizes and this enchanted a number of readers across the centuries, including Machiavelli who was actually,
I don't have the guts to say it, I'm not over the radio, but we can say it in Italian, you can still get away.
I'm sure you can, you are, as an Amariya, you still tell you, it's so elegant when you say something in Italian.
But Machiavelli was someone who took seriously the possibility of a rebirth of Vietteau and political mastery and throw out the invaders and so forth,
and also didn't seem to share his hope that the princes of Italy could ever get it together enough to do that, right?
But also he also had written an extraordinary critique of Machiavelli's political theory within the old Lord of Israel,
so that by leaving him out it's really what I was saying, you are everywhere here.
You are dismembered as a body of Italian culture, it's supposed to be at Stanford.
Well, in the New York, we then move on to Tasso because he deserves a very long discussion of the first.
And he is obviously the heir in a certain sense, also from Ferrara, like Arioso, haunted by the achievement of his predecessor.
In what way is the Jitterus Allebe Barathe different from and at the same time continuous with the Orlando Fudiosa?
I think that Tasso had no, that's a great question, this is a... this should be a class, not the... we need a couple of hours to discuss this.
Look, Tasso in the Jitterus Allebe Barathe really thought that the poem would be the turning point in the history of the epic.
Without without without, he makes it clear.
The poem, "Kam Tolar Me Pitos, Elicapitan, Oechel Gonsepol, Crolly Barrodi Christo," that's the beginning.
I sing the Reverend Harmes and the Captain Holy Barathe, the great supporter of Christ.
That's already the beginning is the Anir, one arm of the Rungquekano.
But you remember that the Orlando Fudiosa ends with the last line of the Anir,
that death of Rodomont is described in terms of...
Turn the turn, exactly, the death of turns, so that almost Riosa says, "Let's start with our own common matrix, Virgil, all over again."
Somehow you missed something about it.
That's one little detail.
But then the other thing is that Riosa is still writing, pretending to write a dynastic poem for our phones, for the Fudiosa family.
That's just completely forget it. It just leaves around.
He gets a grant from a phone so that he's...
You really should try to emulate my hero.
God, Virgil, you know.
So the Lord Mother was...
He's not interested in the dynastic epic aspect.
The third aspect of the poem is that...
Are you still from the start?
It goes on telling the story, it's a tournament and so on.
Whereas that's so...
Goes on invoking the creatures.
You know, there's a famous idea that he's writing, and he has to use fictions.
The famous...
The famous Langworth, you know, the child who is sick, has to receive the medication with the rim of the glass,
spring called with sugar, sweet lipids.
And he takes immediately, this is the third stance, I've mentioned.
So that he knows that he has to deal with two aspects.
The double view of Rome, the creatures, and the niers, the double view of the world, the epicurean view of the world, the
the creatures that are writing for the education of the young neopolarton, the epicurean members,
and the virgilean idea of some kind of providentity.
But more than that, he's going to address the issue of atheism, which, at your start, raises very
quickly in the death of Rodermonta.
Rodermonta is, he says, "A quest for freedom, Rodermonta is the hero of mediators to build, he understands, but that also understands the connection between freedom and
atheism."
And here, that's what is going to review.
He's so interested in the question of the sacred and his confrontation.
He comes after the Council of Trent and with the council to triumph on this idea about the
Catholic tradition, the Council of Trent really meant.
Now, we are going to humiliate the contemplative tradition of the church.
We have been, this is the argument of the fathers in a very rough way.
We have really been the Renaissance men, the la sefaire, and by anything can go.
Now, that's no longer the case.
We have to go, and it's a make or break experience, we have to go.
The missionaries are over the world, and the battle of Le Panto becomes the crucial emblem of this triumph.
They are like the works of teaching, tinctoretto, veronés, and give you a sense of the importance, nothing like this literature.
So, Tasso really wants to explore the possibility of the sacred, the idea of the confrontations of religious views.
He faces the problems, the iconoclasts, the manipulation of icons by the Muslim, the Christian who had become a Muslim, is meno, all this conversation from all of this taking place.
And that locus, the desert, a place of idolatry, a place of revelations, a place of the wayfaders.
So, it's an extraordinarily, completely different poem, because this is the poem of the sacred.
That's what I would call it.
With Ariosto, I call it the poet, the poem of freedom.
And the interesting thing is that before he dies, around 1494, Dastro goes on writing the mondocreato, which he calls the boy masakro,
of a real sacred poem of the poem about the sacred, is really the Josaremiribharata, and the question of the images, the importance of the images.
And ultimately, really a mystical, mystical understanding.
There's also something between Ariosto and Tasso, which is the rediscovery of Aristotle's poetics.
And Tasso's deliberate attempt to write an epic that was, I don't know if it would be saying too much to say, purged of its romance elements, because there's plenty of romance.
That is a lot of romance.
But he wanted to compose an epic that was more a long, standard orthodox, Aristotelian lines, at least the way he and his contemporaries understood it.
Because, among other things, Ariosto wasn't extraordinary literary critic, apart from being an author.
He was a professor of mathematics, a university of Ferrara.
I'm on mathematics, I didn't know that.
Yeah, I'm a great scientist.
It's an extraordinary.
And his commentaries on Plato, in Greek and Plotinus, my student for mine has just been publishing this note.
No, you write that there is this aspect of the tree of Aristotle, this idea of giving a unity, not a variety of plots, as you have in Ariosto's labyrinth.
But a unified action here, which is the story of the Friscrucée, guided by God-or-a-dipuyo, the Friscrucée.
And that's true that this course of the heroic poem debates Aristotle, to neo-Platonic theories of poetry.
But the interesting thing is that he retrieves also the mystical theology of the pseudo-diarmizers, which by the way had been translated into Italian by the investigation, by a Brudgerter of a Sari in France, upon the investigation of the
Paulistic, I want to give your listeners here today the sense of how entangled the various aspects of the Italian culture and the sense of a continuity across centuries, issues, there's the sense of fidelity, the
so-called Italian, Macquavalian, unfaithful, is really little false from this standpoint.
So there's a great deal of commitment to these issues.
And the pseudo-diarmizers, because you see the quest of Tasso is for the Sepulcher, which is a Baroque emblem in a Nuezzo.
But the Sepulcher is oempity, which for the believer is the sign that the Christ is resurrected, for the unbeliever, it's really the sign that there was nothing in it.
So there you go.
And the issue for the great challenge for Tasso is how am I going to explain intellectually this question of the void.
And so there is a double phenyl theology in him, which is what makes him the theology of the defeat of God, I call it, the history, is always a story of the defeat of the divine.
Is that what you would point to account for this underlying kind of basochontino of three tests or a certain kind of melon, I don't mind, but what would be the words?
There's a certain tone of regretfulness in Tasso.
Of course, yes, it's true.
Yeah, there is a sense of man has been abandoned.
And yet, man, human beings can find themselves by looking at the mirror.
You know, he calls it the image, but you have an image, which always implicates the idea of the mirror.
And the image therefore reveals to you that this argument against the account of Westwood,
the image is not something we look at, the image looks at us and reveals us to ourselves.
And in that self-revelation that he can find some kind of a curse and some kind of a piece,
but he is the poet of the crucifix or the crucified.
And that's what I mean, the defeat of God, what we know of God is the defeat of God.
That's his extraordinary theological argument.
That places him, you know, I'm sorry to, I don't want to be pedantic, because I really know that a pedant, I don't think,
maybe you're going to say otherwise, I'll give you the last word.
But the great theorists that he reads, of course, are being in all these other guys, the wicked old, the theorists,
the commentators of Aristotle.
But the great theorists of the six-century art, but Romain, Philip Poneri, Bailot, Baulet,
Baron Yussfag, and your poet and the thing, these are the extraordinarily radical thinkers about aesthetics and theology,
about architecture, about the vast, the sacred vestments, every detail of the newly-tergical life.
He is following them.
None of that is what he has in the...
I really want to stop because you may have another question for me.
What he has in the...
The German-Hungarian, I think, two metaphors that run through from the beginning to the end, the theatre, and the desert.
Both places of hallucinations, of illusions, the theatre, things vanish, reappear, points of view, and the desert, also the place of Mirajas, etc.
And out of these two central metaphors within that, actually, you have... he weaves this extraordinary poem.
I do have one more question about the personage, who for me is one of the great, not the greatest hero, and his favourite hero, and his Armeeda.
How can it taste, so it creates such a powerful, it's kind of completely unbounded hero, who is so powerful, and she's also not a Christian, and he will find a way to redeem her at the end in the most unorthodox manner imaginable within the context of a hero, a Christian poem.
It's unbelievable. What do you make about Mirajas?
To me, Armeeda, you write the she's the tempestress, the seducer, and the redeemer, the same breath.
I mean, retrospectively, a lot of my students are reading Beatrice in pretty much the same way as this, Irene and Beatrice, the two phases of the same thing.
But I think that she, to me, I don't think there is a poet in Italian letters when the stands women as Stasodas.
He was abandoned by them. His madness when he was, you know, when Montagne went to visit him in Ferrara.
The madness was... I don't think... I don't know how... I'm sure he was a bit of a psychopath.
But he was put there as a kind of jail because he really had fallen in love with the Duke's wife.
And they tried to, you know, that you could not allow that. You must be crazy.
But Montagne...
You're even too much for an Italian.
Yeah, that's what...
And Montagne loved the idea of this man who had made a scandal of himself, the man, as well, making a sense.
But anyway, in spite of all this, he understands that three women in the Jerusalem River, each most deductive and more interesting than the other.
Armenia, Corinda, or a figure Corinda, who of course gets killed.
The word "Omonte kills" is a bell of Galicia in the Orlando Furioso.
Here it's Tancredi, who kills Corinda. What a figure, what an extraordinary woman.
And who is also a Muslim woman, but, you know, the miracle is that she is. She had Christian ancestors, which is probably true for most Muslims.
Anyway, the... so it's not really a kind of violence on the historical reality.
And then of course, the story of Armida.
They all belong to the same world, but to me, the great story.
And here Freud, you know, I'm throwing this name that I'm not sure is just to... because, you know, as you know, Orlando Furioso was read by Voltaire.
Voltaire would always keep the Orlando Furioso, but his bedside.
But Freud was a great reader of Tasso.
Guys, this is my... the reason why I mentioned this.
If you really want to be great, read the Tancredi literature.
That seems to be the case. But anyway, the story of Corinda is a fascinating idea because of the Fantasm.
That she, the persistent Fantasm, she will become in Tancredi's mind.
With Armida, her media, you know, gets to be an Italian mama, but the end, you know, so it becomes a good Christian life.
Do you see a genealogy that links Beatrice to Armida throughout this century?
I was hitting that one.
I was hitting that.
That this by students were... I was trying to push me into that.
Especially my undergraduates, you know, but professor, is that...
But how can you have these two women who are not dishiring and that Dante is the same dream in Progatorio?
I was in the first one and then the other. They must be the two. I live at that.
I don't know. I saw it so far.
I suspect it's true, but I won't say it.
Well, I think that you've shown in this hour, Giuseppe, that what I said in my opening remarks,
that there's very little that of any import that doesn't have something to do with Italian literature has been proven true.
So I want to thank you for coming on.
We've been speaking with Professor Giuseppe Matsota from Yale.
He's the Sterling, Professor of Humanities of Italian at Yale University, visiting here at Stanford.
And we've been talking with him on behalf of entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison. Please tune in next week.
And Giuseppe, thank you again.
Next time you're out in Stanford, we'll have you back on to continue.
Thank you. Thank you.
Robby, I really enjoy this. That's great. Thank you.
Bye-bye.
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