Thread: Joseph Hall
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Unread 04-16-2018, 06:35 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Hi Andrew,

The Combe is great fun and deserves to be better known.
Ariosto's Orlando furioso is an answer to Boiardo's Orlando innamorato. I have an old verse translation by W.S. Rose, not sure if there's a modern one. After him, the next Italian satires I know are Alfieri's in about 1780, though Monti translated Persius at about the same time, and Leopardi wrote, I believe, some satire in prose.
In France, you might start with Agrippa d'Aubigne, Les Tragiques. I feel like there's not a lot of medieval satire in the Horace/Juvenal mould. Villon I guess is a satirist, he's certainly worth reading. Boileau I find dull, but he did write satire. La Fontaine has very definite satirical elements. The C18th produced a lot of verse, not all of it great - you might enjoy a look at Voltaire's La Pucelle, a mock epic on Joan of Arc. From Chenier to Mallarme, I can't really think of any extended satire in the C19th, except maybe Hugo's Les Chatiments, on Napoleon III. Not Laforgue or Musset, though Baudelaire writes rude poems on Belgium. Nor any C20th satire.
In Germany, Goethe's and Schiller's Xenien are satirical epigrams, and you'll find more verse satire in Goethe, for instance Das Tagebuch. Wieland translated Horace's satires. Gottsched had a go at satire as well, but you'll find little in Hoelderlin, Buerger, Klopstock, Brentano, the Romantics. Satire came easily to Heine, but not much in verse. Some critics see Eichendorff's tale, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, as a satire, and the case can be made. In the C20th, you might look in Brecht's verse.

Cheers,
John

Oh - I don't really know the Spanish tradition, though Don Quixote is certainly satire. You might look at Lope de Vega and Calderon, who I think wrote more than plays. And did Cervantes also write verse?

Update: there's also this from the French Wars of religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire_Ménippée
But I don't know much satire by Du Bellay, Ronsard, or Louise Labe's Lyon circle.
Update II: please though don't go without reading Pushkin's superb Onegin.

Last edited by John Isbell; 04-16-2018 at 06:43 AM.
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