e darvi sol puo l’úmil sérvo vostro
Quel ch’io vi debbo, posso di parole
Pagare in parte, e d’opere d’inchióstro.
He can pay only in part and with words; with pen and ink, he declares humbly.
The story-telling splendor of the world is in this glowing, complex, impossible fable, written when chivalry was in flower, in Italy.
Its remote forebears were great Indian Epics, the heroic tales of Firdusi, who was the Persian Homer; and its relative in time in his own land, was Virgil’s Æneid. All this accomplished invention went to its grace.
The opening is from Virgil:
Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amóri,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto.
One of this book’s gay far descendants (It has many!) wandered from Italy northward, to fields of France. There it was known as The Three Musketeers. It has had rollicking, gay followers, imitators in the art of letters, throughout the world; not only merry, entire book-sequences, like the romance of Dumas père, but individual lines have been re-written down the centuries.