JERUSALEM UNDELIVERED
TASSO, Torquato; Giovanni Francesco NEGRI, translator.
[Drop-head title:] Della tradottione della Gierusalemme liberata del Tasso in lingua bolognese popolare.
[Bologna, 1628.]
Folio in 6s, pp. 228; A–T6; text in two columns in facing Italian and Bolognese; woodcut initials and tailpieces, argomenti within typographic borders; a good copy in eighteenth-century half vellum with yellow paper sides, edges speckled red, gilt lettering-piece to spine; boards somewhat wormed (particularly the lower); Bibliotheca Albana shelfmarks (‘X.III.6’) to front free endpaper verso and foot of p. 1.
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[Drop-head title:] Della tradottione della Gierusalemme liberata del Tasso in lingua bolognese popolare.
Rare first edition of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata to be translated into dialect, here in facing Bolognese and Italian translation, its printing suspended midway through the thirteenth canto, likely by Cardinal Bernardino Spada, a friend of the translator and the dedicatee of the work.
The painter Giovanni Francesco Negri had studied under Odoardo Fialetti, and composed several sonnets in Bolognese dialect. Here, he transposes into Bolognese dialect Tasso’s epic on the First Crusade, each canto accompanied by critical commentary by Fabrizo Petrucci della Mirandola (here pseudonymously styled ‘Fabricio Alodnarim’). Printed without a title-page, prefatory material (including the dedication to Spada) and interrupted at the end of the thirty-fourth ottava of Canto XIII, completed versions of the text evidently circulated in manuscript (e.g. at the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna).
Reasons for the sudden suppression vary: OPAC SBN cites ‘papal intervention’, or it may have been a reaction to the use of low register in the vernacular for an epic on the Crusades on the part of ‘important men of Bologna, both as a result of the city’s hatred for Cardinal Spada [papal legate to Bologna from 1627 to 1631], to whom the work was dedicated, and to avoid exposing the overly ridiculous effect of their native Bolognese’ (Biondelli, Saggio sui dialetti gallo-italici (1853), p. 454, trans.); by several accounts the intervention was the work of Spada himself, although the sudden halt in printing did not appear to affect Negri’s relationship to his patron in the long term: Spada would be named godfather of Negri’s son three years later.
Provenance: From the library of the Albani family, collected by Giovanni Francesco Albani (1649–1721), later Pope Clement XI, and his nephew Alessandro (1692–1779). The dispersal of the library began with the French invasion in 1797; it was subsequently sold in various stages, both privately and through public auctions (see Clough, ‘The Albani library and Pope Clement XI’, in Librarium, 12 (1969) pp. 11–21). The present volume does not appear in the 1858 Bibliotheca Albana catalogue, but curiously a 1774 edition of the Gerusalemme liberata in facing Milanese and Italian translation does (lot 135).
OCLC finds one copy in the UK (BL), and one in the US (Newberry).
BM STC Italian, p. 894; USTC 4007842. See Arico’, ‘Il patetico grottesco: “La Gerusalemme liberata” bolognese di Gio. Francesco Negri’, in Studi settecenteschi XXVI (1985), pp. 177–207.
