Lodovico Ariosto

Born Sept. 8, 1474, in Reggio, Emilia; died July 6, 1533, in Ferrara. Italian poet.

Ariosto wrote plays and occasional verses. Among his “minor works” (opere minori) are Latin poems—hexameters, odes, elegies, and epigrams—and Italian poems—sonnets, madrigals, and canzonas on amorous themes. In his Satires, Ariosto imitated Horace. Five Italian comedies, among them The Necromancer (1520) and The Bawd (1528), are part of Ariosto’s minor works. Of outstanding importance is his narrative poem in octavos, Orlando Furioso, which was published in 40 cantos in 1516 (2nd ed., 1521) and in 46 cantos in 1532. Ariosto, so to speak, had continued M. Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, combining the thematic elements of the French epic with the chivalric cycle of the romances of the Round Table. But in fact he had written a new kind of humanistic narrative poem, independent of his predecessors. Ariosto’s narrative poem has been translated into all European languages. In Russia, Orlando Furioso was translated from French (2 parts, 1791–93). S. E. Raich made an incomplete translation in iambic tetrameter

(2 vols., 1832–33).