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| | FT February 2005: Books in Review (Site not responding. Last check: ) |
 | | And it was in Italian that Orlando ultimately achieved his apotheosis as the supreme hero of chivalric fiction, in the three greatest Italian romances of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the Morgante of Luigi Pulci, the Orlando Innamorato of Matteo Boiardo, and the Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto. |
 | | They are at once heroic, comic, allegorical, lyrical, satirical, fabulous, and (occasionally) dark; they move with alarming ease between the metaphysical and the ribald, the allegorical and the brutal, the spiritual and the grotesque. |
 | | Boiardo was a “rougher” poet than Ariosto, true, but Ross is sometimes far too colloquial; and often the delicate glitter of Boiardo’s genuinely lyric passages is rendered by Ross in a pale gray wash. He confines himself, for some reason, to a tetrametric line that is needlessly curt. |
| www.firstthings.com /ftissues/ft0502/reviews/hart.htm (1879 words) |
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