Exeter Department of Modern Languages Research Seminar
Max Wickert
(State University of New York, Buffalo)
On Translating a Renaissance Classic: Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata
Wednesday 18 March 2009, 4.15 pm in LT 7, Queen’s Building
All welcome
Max Wickert’s verse translation of Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century epic was published in February 2009 in Oxford World’s Classics, with Introduction and Notes by Mark Davie. It is the first English translation of the poem since Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600) to reproduce the eight-line stanza form of the Italian original. In this seminar he will discuss some of the challenges of translating ottava rima into English, with examples from the long tradition of English narative poetry based on Italian models. Copies of the texts which he will refer to are available outside room 236 in Queen’s.
Max Wickert is also the author of two collections of poems, All the Weight of the Still Midnight and Pat Sonnets. He is currently translating a selection of Tasso’s lyric poetry.
For more information contact Mark Davie.
