The Italian Epic's English Pantheon (Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante) (Book Review‪)‬

Luigi Pulci. Morgante. The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante. Trans. Joseph Tusiani. Introd. and comm. Edoardo A. Lebano. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Pp. xxxiii + 975. Among the many ideas that rushed to my mind when I first picked up this handsomely printed, English translation and commentary of Luigi Pulci's Morgante, which exceeds 1,000 pages, one was first and foremost: Finally, a little more than half a millennium after its first publication (1483), Pulci's Morgante maggiore has been sanctioned as a classic not just of Italian literature but of world literature as well. For Luigi Pulci, with Joseph Tusiani's translation and Edoardo A. Lebano's commentary, has entered the pantheon of Italian epic poetry translated into English thus far inhabited only by his three Italian followers: Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. In fact, although the answer to the question, may be almost impossible, this English translation and commentary of Morgante proclaims unhesitatingly the fifteenth-century mock-epic a "classic," thus recognizing the position of Pulci's masterpiece next to his rato, Ariosto's Orlando furioso, and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.