Awhen the Roland Furious reappears in my pocket in the Points collection, a question as old as literature itself rests: why read the classics? and more particularly, in the case which interests us, why read the epics? The question, rather than why, is comment – the way we approach, readers as passers-by (editors and translators), the monument that one might think dusty and yet shimmering that is the epic classic. Between the beautiful unfaithful and the heavy copy of illegible schoolboy, is there not a happy medium for our time? It is no coincidence that the great Italo Calvino had “chosen and told” the Roland Furious in an Italian edition translated in France (formerly GF-Flammarion, today Gallimard, “From the whole world”) – since to read Ariosto today is to ask the thorny question of the classic: what it is in front of the eternal, which it can be for us today. Any classic written in a foreign language reaches us through an act of mediation which allows it to survive, which updates it for our time, but which necessarily guides the vision we have of it.
Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Ariosto and Tasso have long been translated into prose. Perhaps because the prose, which does not have a measured concern for the verse, can extend and contain everything, and the metric form of the verse can seem a constraint for those who want to convey a text without affixing it to it. other constraints for its survival. Prose has its defenders, and it can have its own qualities: great authors, Chateaubriand translating Milton, Leconte de Lisle translating Homer, have worked in prose. We understand the prose translating the verse, we understand these choices, these doubts, these fears; and it can offer a text just as fraught with tensions as that in verse – thus Mallarmé translating the Raven of Poe, in another genre. Prose can be a less arid first field of approach than verse for epics – although some prose translations may seem more arid than in verse. Because readers of the classics know that a refusal to enter is never final; they simply have to find the right ferryman, the right cicerone who, like Virgil in Dante’s poem, will open the way for him. Reading the classics that universal literature has left us is accepting to wait until we find the translation that suits the expectations of each particular reader.
But translating a work written in verse into prose is the choice to convey the matter to the detriment of way. It is to think that we are only interested, in these monuments from a past which continues to enlighten us, that history, fiction, the images that the cinema can transpose (thus the film Sluts adapting the iliad) – quid then of the famous Homeric epithets, Achilles feet-fast, Hector helmet-flame, Ulysses with numerous tricks? Don’t you feel the cavalcade that is heard in these repeated epithets – that they are constitutive of the text, inseparable, that they are Homer himself? Could we remove Flaubert’s semicolons, shorten Proust’s sentences, prune Claude Simon’s parentheses? These translations into prose perhaps also attest to a prediction that is more and more assertive, as the centuries advance, for narrative prose and for the novel, which has become the majority form of world literature. However, if the ancient epics are in many respects the antechamber of the modern novel, their modality of enunciation must be respected for what it is: mediated by song, voice, the rhythm of the verse. The manner is as important as the material; you cannot sweep it away with the back of your hand. Could we translate the prose of Don Quixote towards ? The question also arises for the song of gesture and the Arthurian novel: the pocket editions often offer a prosaized Chrétien de Troyes, thus passing on its composition in verse. It is not even a question of language, fidelity, idioms, but quite simply the question of the visual and typographical aspect of the text which is at stake and which is an integral part of its identity: Perceval and the Grail Tale does not spell out like a big block of prose, any more than Homer, Virgil or Ariosto. It is not, of course, that a visual and typographical aspect, but well a presupposition governing his act of composition. It does not prevent certain translations (the odyssey by Victor Bérard, for example) to be real texts, but in the refusal of the verse something irremediably gets lost in relation to the original text.
It is thus the merit of our literary epoch to have allowed the rediscovery of certain classics of our world literature. Versified translation often allows a greater vividness of the text than prose does. We can especially salute the exciting work of Olivier Sers at the Belles Lettres editions, he who translated into Alexandrines the aeneid of Virgil, Metamorphoses of Ovid, Of The Nature Of Things of Lucretia, and thus gave them the strength of a French text, but also the admirable translation of the iliad by Philippe Brunet. Michel Orcel also made this choice of verse to translate Ariosto, just as he had done for his translation of another classic of Italian poetry, the Jerusalem Delivered of the Cup. It is this translation alone of the Roland Furious, published in a bilingual edition at Le Seuil in 2000, which is republished in pocket by Points, thus allowing a wider audience to rediscover this classic, which is a little forgotten today.
The Roland Furious (Furious orlando) is an epic poem published by Ariosto between 1516 and 1532, that is to say thirty years of work and three successive editions until the death of the poet. It is a resumption or continuation of the Roland in love de Boiardo, pre-text of Ariosto that Calvino sums up as a “poem of a rather rudimentary prosody, written in a hesitant Italian and continually overflowing in the patois. His fortune will turn into misfortune: the love that other poets will bring him is so anxious to help him, like a creature unfit to live on his own strength, that he ends up obsessing him and doing so. disappear from circulation. Posterity has forgotten Boiardo’s Roland to retain Ariosto’s Roland, which already says a lot about Ariosto’s poetics of composition: The furious Roland is a decisive text in European literature because it is a swan song. He takes up, recomposes and remodels a certain number of pre-existing materials, mixed and redistributed in his narrative whirlwind.
Its protagonist is the well-known Roland, inherited from our Roland’s song, semi-legendary nephew of Charlemagne, who also intervenes in the story. One of the main arguments of the poem lies in the trajectory of Roland who, in love, goes mad when his love is betrayed. To this are added two other major narrative arcs, the loves of Roger and Bradamante, and the struggle between Charlemagne and the Saracens. But it would be very daring to claim to include here the multiple stories and branches of the Roland Furious, which is distinguished by the very lively profusion of its stories.
It is a text which is, in many ways, a legacy: what is most fascinating in the Roland Furious is perhaps the malleability of its material. Ariosto’s text is textured, it welcomes and collects within it what it wants: it mixes and opposes the Four Aymon Sons and the Roland’s song, it attracts the marvelous and the magical, it uses certain elements of the material of Brittany and remembers certain elements of Greco-Roman mythology. But Ariosto is not content to repeat, he transforms everything he puts in his text: his Roland is not Turold’s, but his own, and all the protagonists and the intricate stories of his poem bear the mark of his fictional joviality. Calvino puts it this way: “From the rough bark of the 15th century, the 16th century emerges and explodes in a luxuriant vegetation of flowers and fruits”. The Roland Furious is a text which, as Remy de Gourmont said, concentrates and subsumes the great genres inherited from Antiquity: “Like the summary of an entire literature, the last novel of chivalry, the one in which all the qualities of the genre are condensed, which has none of the faults and which, finally, is written by a great poet ”. Swan song, in a way, but that does not make it a way out, because the Roland Furious is a twilight without melancholy, a workhorse of potential literature before its time, which will give in particular the Don Quixote – where the Roland Furious is one of the only works surviving the famous autodafe of the priest of chapter VI. Calvino still said of Ariosto that he was a poet “who suffers from what the world is as it is, from what it is not as it should be, and who nevertheless represents it as a spectacle. multicolored and multifaceted, to be viewed with sly wisdom ”.
This garden with its bifurcating paths appears like a sort of wonderful, dopamine and doped song of gesture, the seams of which explode on all sides, multiplying the adventures, the branches, the intertwining. The Roland Furious keeps changing its focal point, geographic and fictional. It is also difficult to follow its multiple branches, which keep multiplying according to a system reminiscent of Russian dolls; but we can also admire this narrative machine which never ceases to put in the stirrup an ever new grain to grind.
The motif that runs through and intertwines all the scattered threads of the text is a horse, horse jump and frolic as Montaigne will dream, as Scarron and Diderot will also do; but it’s not just a horse cavalcade, it’s no longer Renaud de Montauban’s Bayard from the Four Aymon Sons. With Ariosto, the motif is the Hippogriff, the legendary horse, the one who carries the hero of the story and readers between places, scenes, genres, eras; it is the joy carried away by the story galloping towards its own flight, its always renewal. Through the imperious and unpredictable movement of the standard Hippogriff of poetics in movement, Ariosto concatenates a Gordian knot of fiction where previously heterogeneous materials mingle and merge, and the joy of the story fully explodes there.
Arioste, Roland Furious, translation Michel Orcel, Editions Points, April 2021, t. I, 720 p., 9 € 50 and t. II, 816 p., 9 € 90
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