Epic Mess: Nonnus to Marino
2023; Boston University; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/arn.2023.a905658
ISSN2327-6436
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Academic Research Studies
ResumoEpic Mess:Nonnus to Marino Gordon Braden (bio) Venus to Adonis, in Giambattista Marino's L'Adone: Quella bocca mi porgi. O cara bocca,dela reggia del riso uscio gemmato,siepe di rose, in cui saetta e scoccaviperetta amorosa arabo fiato. (8.122.1–4) Give me your mouth. O dear mouth, jeweled gateway to the kingdom of your smile, roses in which the amorous little viper exhales Arabian breath.1 It has taken the goddess of love a while but she has finally gotten her young man into bed and (what never quite happens in Shakespeare's telling of the story) they have become lovers. Their successful lovemaking inspires her to an anticipation of the famous lyric that in historical time Catullus will write about kissing: Godianci, amianci … ("let us enjoy and love one another,"116.1—mirroring the incipit of Catullus 5, Vivamus […] atque amemus). She has scarcely begun her panegyric when she reaches for an arresting metaphor that Catullus will not use: on the other side of Adonis's teeth (the neo-Petrarchan jewels of his mouth's gateway) beckons his tongue like a venomous little snake: viperetta amorosa. Love stings, lethally, and that is part of what drives Venus wild.2 This comes in literature's most expansive telling of the story of Venus and Adonis. Marino's poem, 40,984 lines in 20 cantos of ottava rima, had a brief life as a literary sensation, famous even before its publication in 1623 when it eclipsed on the European scene any flicker of interest roused by Shakespeare's First Folio. Marino was already an international literary [End Page 63] celebrity on the continent, the acknowledged master of a highly mannered, much imitated poetic style known as Marinismo. Caravaggio painted his portrait as a young man; in 1609 the powerful Duke of Savoy (whose house was eventually to produce the first King of Italy) made him a knight of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, and he subsequently passed up no opportunity to style himself cavaliere. L'Adone, on which he worked for some twenty years, was his epic summa. Part of the summing up is narrative, both mythological and historical; as we read the story of Venus and Adonis we also read (not a complete list) the stories of Cupid and Psyche, the Judgment of Paris, Actaeon and Diana, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Bacchus and a boy called Pampino, Polyphemus and Galatea (with his subsequent blinding by Ulysses added for good measure), Hero and Leander, the life of Achilles, as well as the careers of Louis XIII of France and his mother Marie de' Medici, and also of some especially accomplished Italian aristocrats of note who sail in from the seventeenth century (having been blown off course by the contrivance of the goddess Tethys) to participate in Adonis's funeral games. Locally the poem keeps up a stanza-bystanza allusion to its author's relentless reading in the literature of classical antiquity and early modern Italy. The dense references—names, places, sentiments, figures of speech—are clearly meant to have their sometimes complicated lineage recognized, or at least to tease a savvy readership with the possibility of spotting them. The extensive notes in Giovanni Pozzi's modern edition pin down a lot of them, though there are probably more to be tracked. A certain encyclopedic agenda extends even into contemporary science with the mention of Galileo by name (10.43.2), a precedent followed by Milton in Paradise Lost (5.262). Pozzi traces the deadly snake in Adonis's mouth to a poem by Marino's Ferrarese contemporary Fulvio Testi: Viperette soavi, / Che con dolci veneni / Ferite il cor ("gentle little vipers which wound the heart with sweet venom").3 This is not, as Pozzi also shows, an isolated example; snakes and sex slither against each other repeatedly in the poetry of Marino and his Italian predecessors. Angelo Poliziano in his Stanze per la giostra gives [End Page 64] the erotic awakening of serpents two lines in his catalogue of Spring: zufola e soffia il serpe per la biscia, / mentre ella con tre lingue al sol si liscia ("the serpent hisses and pants...
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