What one reviewer at amazon said about Jerusalem Delivered:
Most every reader of literature in English is familiar with Arthurian romance and legend, from Malory's medieval masterpiece "Mort d'Arthur" to Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" to contemporary writers like Mary Stewart and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
But how many of these readers are aware that there exists in Western literature another, parallel stream of myth and legend called Carolingian, which celebrates the exploits and heroes of the Age--not of Arthur--but of Charlemagne?
Carolingian epic and romance may safely be said to begin with "The Song of Roland" (available in W.S. Merwin's excellent translation in the Modern Library volume "Medieval Epics"), but the tradition includes scores if not hundreds of contributors--and three of these constitute together a magnificent achievement: Pulci's "Morgante," Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered."
Maybe due to the hyper-popularity of Arthurian material, these three major authors and their respective masterpieces have a shockingly undistinguished and short list of english translations. Happily, Anthony Esolens has supplied us with a truly superb, vivid, and beautiful rendering of Tasso's neglected epic. It is so good, in fact, that I second the reviewer below in hoping for a future translation of Ariosto. For what it's worth, Bernard Knox wrote a highly favorable review of this edition in the New York Times Book Review, in which he called Esolen's work "a triumph." Don't hesitate.
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