Orlando Furioso

keep his vantage taxing strength and thought.

So shifting oft his hold, about the Moor
His arms the good and bold Rogero wound;
Against his left flank shoved his breast, and sore
Strained him with all his strength engirdled round,
At once he past his better leg before
Rodomont’s knees and pushed, and from the ground
Uplifted high in air the Moorish lord;
Then hurled him down head foremost on the sward.

Such was the shock wherewith King Rodomont
With battered head and spine the champion smote,
That, issuing from his wounds as from a font,
Streams of red blood the crimsoned herbage float.
Rogero, holding Fortune by the front,
Lest he should rise, with one hand griped his throat,
With one a dagger at his eyes addrest;
And with his knees the paynim’s belly prest.

As sometimes where they work the golden vein
Within Pannonian or Iberian cave,
In unexpected ruin whelm the train
By impious avarice there condemned to slave,
So with the load they lie opprest, with pain
A passage can their prisoned spirit have:
No less opprest the doughty paynim lay,
Pinned to the ground in that disastrous fray.

Rogero at his vizor doth present
His naked poniard’s point, with threatening cry,
“That he will slay him, save he yields, content
To let him live, if he for grace apply.”
But Rodomont, who rather than be shent
For the least deed of shame, preferred to die,
Writhed, struggled, and with all his vigour tried
To pull Rogero down, and nought replied.

As mastiff that below the deer-hound lies,
Fixed by the gullet fast, with holding bite,
Sorely bestirs himself and vainly tries,
With lips besmeared with foam and eyes alight,
And cannot from beneath the conqueror rise,
Who foils his foe by force, and not despite;
So vainly strives the monarch of Argier
To rise from underneath the cavalier.

Yet Rodomont so twists and strives, he gains
The freedom of his better arm anew;
And with the right hand, which his poniard strains,
For he had drawn his deadly dagger too,
Would wound Rogero underneath the reins:
But now the wary youth the error knew
Through which he might have died, by his delay
That impious Saracen forthwith to slay;

And smiting twice or thrice his horrid front,
Raising as high as he could raise in air
His dagger, buried it in Rodomont;
And freed himself withal from further care.
Loosed from the more than icy corse, to font
Of fetid Acheron, and hell’s foul repair,
The indignant spirit fled, blaspheming loud;589
Erewhile on earth so haughty and so proud.

Endnotes

1. A second wheat harvest follows closely upon the first in some parts of Tuscany. ↩

2. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. ↩

3. Thus translated obscurely, but more accurately, by Huggins:

   Towards the west I came along that strand
   Which does the powerful northern blast command.

   ↩

4. I have used the name by which he is best known in French and English legends. He is called Orlando by Ariosto, and Rotolando by some of the more ancient romancers. His name and signature are said to have been seen in certain charters of Charlemagne. In the Latin Chronicles of the middle ages he is called Rutlandus and Ruitlandus. ↩

5. The Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, son of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. ↩

6. This Rogero, Ruggiero in the original, is supposed to be Rizieri of Risa, whose name is changed according to the customary transmutation of Venetian letters into their Tuscan equivalents, as z into g. He, however, is said to have flourished before the time of Charlemagne, and to have died childless. The supposed descent of the family of Este from Rizieri, and their pretensions to be of the blood of Charlemagne, for Bradamant was the niece of that emperor, made Ariosto adopt Rogero as the real hero of his poem. ↩

7. Angelica, daughter of Galaphron, king of Cathay, the capital of which was Albracca. ↩

8. Rinaldo, cousin to Orlando, is known by different names, as Renaud and Arnaud. He was eldest son of Amone, in Italian, Aymon, in French, of Monte Albano, or Mont Auban. ↩

9. In the footrace. Dante uses the same comparison in his Inferno, canto XV, the concluding lines.

   “With that he turned, and seemed as one of those
   Who race upon Verona’s spacious plain
   For the green cloth; nor seemed of them who lose,
   But he who the disputed prize will gain.

   ↩

10. Imitated from Virgil, Aeneid II l. 379. ↩

11. He was also called Ferraute and Ferracuto. He is said to have been slain by Orlando, who wounded him in the navel, the only vulnerable part about him. ↩

12. Orlando and Rinaldo. ↩

13. The continuation of an old story, for which see the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo. Argalìa was brother to Angelica. ↩

14. Almonte in the text, called by others Aimonte. For the rest, these stories, though “half told,” develope themselves in the course of the poem. ↩

15. Translated, and with little variation, from Catullus’s beautiful comparison, in his epithalamium on Manlius and Julia. (See Lamb’s translation in Bohn’s edition, p. 228.) ↩

16. Sacripant, who is one of Boiardo’s dramatis personae, figures more especially in the warfare,

    “When Agrican, with all his northern powers,
    Besieged Albracca, as romances tell,
    The city of Galaphron; from thence to win
    The fairest of her sex, Angelica,
    His daughter, sought by many prowest knights,
    Both paynim and the peers of Charlemagne.”

    Paradise Regained.

    ↩

17. An Italian commentator writes more than a page to prove that Ariosto must have meant il pino grandissimo, that is, the stone-pine, or Pinus pinea of Linnaeus, with a top like an umbrella; but has omitted the best reason for supposing so; to wit, that it is