Orlando furioso, Barbara Reynolds, and the Warrior Maidens (original) (raw)
2019, DLS: American Journal of Sayers Studies, 2019
Barbara Reynolds, famed Italian scholar, developed a deep and collegial friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers. Reynolds wrote the biography, "Dorothy L. Sayers: Her life and soul," and when Sayers passed away before finishing her translation of Dante's "Paradiso," Reynolds completed the task for publication. Reynolds was also known for translating "Orlando furioso," Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem. This article discusses Reynolds' scholarship and gives an overview of Ariosto's poem with highlights of the titular character Orlando's storyline as well as that of the warrior maiden Bradamante and her beloved Ruggiero. Full journal can be found: https://americanjournalofsayersstudies.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/dls-volume-ii-2019-wordpress-mutual-admiration-1a-1.pdf
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The Orlando Furioso, a great sixteenth-century poem of the Italian literature, had undoubtedly fundamental importance in the development of the narrative poetics of the Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985), as well as we can note in the case of The Nonexistent Knight (1959) or The castle of crossed destinies (1973). The first critical contribution about the Ariosto’s poem appears in 1966 and it is the introduction to the Einaudi’s edition of the Furioso, now re-published with the title “The Structure of the Orlando Furioso” in Why Read the Classics? (1991). Afterward, Calvino conducted some radiophonic broadcasts about the Orlando Furioso, from which he realized the editorial project of the Orlando furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino (Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto told by Italo Calvino, 1970). In this book, Calvino interspersed comments and narrations in prose to the verses of the original text of the poem, without respecting the division in cantos, but following the errant movement of events of the poem’s characters. Therefore, the work of Calvino is not an anthology, but it is a reading path and a rewriting of the Ariosto’s poem. In this communication, by starting from the intertextual theory of the transpositional processes and of the serious transformations, I intend to analyze the rereading of the Orlando Furioso made by Calvino, considering it as the rewriting of a fundamental work of the Western canon, re-proposed to the modern reader through a new narrative sensibility.
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