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“Bucar’s sharp insights, shot through with humour and self-awareness, are exactly what we need the next time we reach over to borrow from someone else’s religion for our own therapeutic, political, or educational needs.” —Gene Demby, cohost and correspondent for NPR’s Code Switch “Liz Bucar explores the moral risk of intercultural theft. Stealing My Religion is a powerful intervention by a leading scholar of religion into the illiberal results of everyday religious exploitation. Highly recommended.” —Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion “A welcome and necessary reminder that all of us, ultimately, are unreliable narrators when we weave ourselves into others’ stories.” —Jeff Yang, coauthor of Rise:APopHistory ofAsianAmericafromtheNinetiestoNow Belknap Press | hup.harvard.edu hup.harvard.edu
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diary alberto manguel Travels with Orlando Castelnuovo di Garfagnana is a small fortified town in a valley halfway between the Apennines and the Apuan Alps, in the province of Lucca. I’m here at the invitation of the town hall to give a talk on Ludovico Ariosto, who was governor of this remote citadel for three years, from February 1522 to June 1525. Castelnuovo is celebrating his arrival five centuries ago with the opening of a Centre for Fantasy and the Imagination in La Rocca, the garrison tower occupied by the poet during his stay. The Duke of Ferrara sent Ariosto to this bandit-infested province, some say to rid the ducal court of his influence, others to distance him from his love, the beautiful Alessandra Benucci. Whatever the case, Ariosto proved himself an excellent governor. Legend has it that once, while out on a stroll, he fell into the hands of a band of robbers. When the chief discovered that his captive was none other than the author of Orlando Furioso, he apologised to the poet and kept guard on him until he reached home safely. I’m supposed to talk about Ariosto’s idea of what is fantastic and what is real in Orlando Furioso. The great narrative poem has always seemed to me a sort of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote masterpiece, an endless comedy of encounters and misencounters, sudden unexpected dangers and sudden magical solutions, cunning cross-dressings and absurd coincidences, and endless travels from one end of the known world to the other and beyond, all the way to the moon, where, in Ariosto’s cosmology, everything that we lose on earth is carefully stored. Therefore, when Orlando becomes furioso and loses his wits, the brave Astolfo flies to the moon with St John the Evangelist, who explains that the lost wits of Orlando are kept in a little jar conveniently labelled with the hero’s name and that Astolfo should carry it back to earth and make Orlando drink it. A number of strong men are needed to pin down the crazy Orlando and force the sensible beverage down his gullet. In the end, almost forty thousand lines later, all is well and the hero becomes sane once more. Ariosto kept on tinkering with Orlando Furioso until the day of his death, adding cantos and amending lines. In his poem Ariosto, perhaps seeking relief from the strictures of his administrative job, seems not to give a toss for narrative logic. Everything and anything that can happen does happen, changing course from one scene to the next. The critics who have endlessly debated the method in his madness seem to have ignored Ariosto’s message in creating the magician Atlante’s palace of illusions, where everything is both real and imaginary. In Ariosto’s own words (translated by Barbara Reynolds): Although deceit is mostly disapproved, Seeming to show a mind malevolent, Many a time it brings, as has been proved, Advantages that are self-evident. Atlante’s palace symbolises the obdurate persistence of fantasy. In Ariosto’s poem, what you imagine you see and what you imagine you desire are what you get. In this enchanted palace, Orlando sees the fleeting Angelica because he seeks the fleeting Angelica; he sees the valorous knights – Ruggiero, Gradasso, Brandimarte and others – because in his mind they are his present rivals. Ruggiero hears in the voice that Orlando takes to be that of Angelica calling for help the voice of his beloved Bradamante. Reality and fantasy are one and the same. It is our reading that is individually selective. In Atlante’s palace, everyone is Pierre Menard. A few days after the lecture, the cultural adviser to the mayor drives us up a corkscrew road to the village of Lucignana, where an old friend, the poet Alba Donati, has built a minuscule bookshop appropriately called La Libreria sulla Collina. Perched over the distant valley with the green Tuscan mountains on the horizon, Alba’s bookshop is a magical place. On a narrow ledge where her mother used to grow lettuce, Alba has set a few tables and chairs for customers to sip tea and read. Alba’s bookshop burned down a year ago and was rebuilt with the help of volunteers and anonymous donors. In the evening, we go to the Alfieri Theatre to attend a show by the puppet master Mimmo Cuticchio. Mimmo comes from a long tradition of Sicilian puppeteers and, like his father before him, performs a centuries-old version of Orlando Furioso, probably much like the one witnessed by Don Quixote, and as convincingly acted out. Don Quixote attacked the stage where the adventures of Charlemagne and his knights were being performed because he was convinced of the truth of Ariosto’s fiction. We forget that what we deem unbelievable was in Ariosto’s time commonplace reality. In Edward Wilson-Lee’s remarkable A History of Water (which I’ve brought with me), I read that an early medieval decree gave the Portuguese crown the right to tax anyone who caught a mermaid, and that an edict of 1461 forbade private citizens to trade in chilli, civet cats and unicorns. Sitting in the audience in the Alfieri Theatre, we felt not called to action like Cervantes’s knight, but certainly stirred and amused. Two centuries after Ariosto’s death, Heinrich von Kleist declared that he preferred the performance of a puppet to that of a live actor, and argued that ‘grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.’ Mimmo would surely agree. Thunder and lightning break out during the night, illuminating the range of mountains known as the Dead Man because of its morbidly suggestive outline. Ariosto, from his room in La Rocca, would have witnessed a similar scene five centuries ago. september 2022 | Literary Review 1

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diary alberto manguel

Travels with Orlando

Castelnuovo di Garfagnana is a small fortified town in a valley halfway between the Apennines and the Apuan Alps, in the province of Lucca. I’m here at the invitation of the town hall to give a talk on Ludovico Ariosto, who was governor of this remote citadel for three years, from February 1522 to June 1525. Castelnuovo is celebrating his arrival five centuries ago with the opening of a Centre for Fantasy and the Imagination in La Rocca, the garrison tower occupied by the poet during his stay. The Duke of Ferrara sent Ariosto to this bandit-infested province, some say to rid the ducal court of his influence, others to distance him from his love, the beautiful Alessandra Benucci. Whatever the case, Ariosto proved himself an excellent governor. Legend has it that once, while out on a stroll, he fell into the hands of a band of robbers. When the chief discovered that his captive was none other than the author of Orlando Furioso, he apologised to the poet and kept guard on him until he reached home safely.

I’m supposed to talk about Ariosto’s idea of what is fantastic and what is real in Orlando Furioso. The great narrative poem has always seemed to me a sort of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote masterpiece, an endless comedy of encounters and misencounters, sudden unexpected dangers and sudden magical solutions, cunning cross-dressings and absurd coincidences, and endless travels from one end of the known world to the other and beyond, all the way to the moon, where, in Ariosto’s cosmology, everything that we lose on earth is carefully stored. Therefore, when Orlando becomes furioso and loses his wits, the brave Astolfo flies to the moon with St John the Evangelist, who explains that the lost wits of Orlando are kept in a little jar conveniently labelled with the hero’s name and that Astolfo should carry it back to earth and make Orlando drink it. A number of strong men are needed to pin down the crazy Orlando and force the sensible beverage down his gullet. In the end, almost forty thousand lines later, all is well and the hero becomes sane once more.

Ariosto kept on tinkering with Orlando Furioso until the day of his death, adding cantos and amending lines. In his poem Ariosto, perhaps seeking relief from the strictures of his administrative job, seems not to give a toss for narrative logic. Everything and anything that can happen does happen, changing course from one scene to the next. The critics who have endlessly debated the method in his madness seem to have ignored Ariosto’s message in creating the magician Atlante’s palace of illusions, where everything is both real and imaginary. In Ariosto’s own words (translated by Barbara Reynolds):

Although deceit is mostly disapproved, Seeming to show a mind malevolent, Many a time it brings, as has been proved, Advantages that are self-evident.

Atlante’s palace symbolises the obdurate persistence of fantasy. In Ariosto’s poem, what you imagine you see and what you imagine you desire are what you get. In this enchanted palace, Orlando sees the fleeting Angelica because he seeks the fleeting Angelica; he sees the valorous knights – Ruggiero, Gradasso, Brandimarte and others – because in his mind they are his present rivals. Ruggiero hears in the voice that Orlando takes to be that of Angelica calling for help the voice of his beloved Bradamante. Reality and fantasy are one and the same. It is our reading that is individually selective. In Atlante’s palace, everyone is Pierre Menard.

A few days after the lecture, the cultural adviser to the mayor drives us up a corkscrew road to the village of Lucignana, where an old friend, the poet Alba Donati, has built a minuscule bookshop appropriately called La Libreria sulla Collina. Perched over the distant valley with the green Tuscan mountains on the horizon, Alba’s bookshop is a magical place. On a narrow ledge where her mother used to grow lettuce, Alba has set a few tables and chairs for customers to sip tea and read. Alba’s bookshop burned down a year ago and was rebuilt with the help of volunteers and anonymous donors.

In the evening, we go to the Alfieri Theatre to attend a show by the puppet master Mimmo Cuticchio. Mimmo comes from a long tradition of Sicilian puppeteers and, like his father before him, performs a centuries-old version of Orlando Furioso, probably much like the one witnessed by Don Quixote, and as convincingly acted out. Don Quixote attacked the stage where the adventures of Charlemagne and his knights were being performed because he was convinced of the truth of Ariosto’s fiction. We forget that what we deem unbelievable was in Ariosto’s time commonplace reality. In Edward Wilson-Lee’s remarkable A History of Water (which I’ve brought with me), I read that an early medieval decree gave the Portuguese crown the right to tax anyone who caught a mermaid, and that an edict of 1461 forbade private citizens to trade in chilli, civet cats and unicorns.

Sitting in the audience in the Alfieri Theatre, we felt not called to action like Cervantes’s knight, but certainly stirred and amused. Two centuries after Ariosto’s death, Heinrich von Kleist declared that he preferred the performance of a puppet to that of a live actor, and argued that ‘grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.’ Mimmo would surely agree.

Thunder and lightning break out during the night, illuminating the range of mountains known as the Dead Man because of its morbidly suggestive outline. Ariosto, from his room in La Rocca, would have witnessed a similar scene five centuries ago.

september 2022 | Literary Review 1

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