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One hardly thinks of Petrarch as needing translation into Italian—but of course his epic Africa, composed in Latin, was not immediately accessible to Italianate readers who lacked a reading knowledge of the older language. In 1570, Fabio Maretti "most faithfully" translated three of the poem's nine books into Italian ottava rima. This was the verse form which Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) had established as the standard for Italian romance and epic in his mid fourteenth-century poems, Il filostrato and Teseida. Its stature as the appropriate verse form for epic had been further solidified by both Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), in Orlando furioso (1516), and Torquato Tasso (1544-1594), in Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Anglophone readers may know the form best from its use by Byron (1788-1824) in Don Juan (1819-1824.) Farri printed his Italian-language translation of the Africa alongside Petrarch's Latin. |
