2024/02/22 by Nicholas Jones · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
paper · doi:10.3998/mpub.14378782
openalex publication_date 2024/02/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/25
Five hundred years ago, working from hints in classical Greek and Latin poets, the young author Jacopo Sannazaro crafted the book called <I>Arcadia</I>, a narrative in richly descriptive Italian prose interwoven with elegant and passionate poems. A young man—transparently a stand-in for the author—leaves his home in Naples to join a community of shepherds in the remote Greek region of Arcadia. Yet he finds that this seemingly idyllic land is as fraught as the homeland he fled. Like the author's humanist community in Naples, ravaged in the fifteenth century by invasion and regime change, the eloquent shepherd-poets of <I>Arcadia </I>are driven to distraction and depression by the frustrations of desire and the social unrest that threatens their pastoral lives. Amidst all that, they tell each other their personal histories and share their sorrows in song.<BR /><BR /> Sannazaro's <I>Arcadia </I>is widely recognized as a foundational text of pastoral poetry, humanism, and Italian literature. But the book itself has been largely inaccessible to English-language students and readers. This new translation uses contemporary American English to convey <I>Arcadia</I>'s youthful vigor, narrative energy, and poetic inventiveness. The extensive introduction and commentaries place <I>Arcadia </I>in the context of late fifteenth-century humanist thought and writing, as well as the complicated crisis of Naples in the years just before 1500. This translation is designed to facilitate the re-entry of <I>Arcadia </I>into scholarly discourse and general readership while outlining its lasting cultural influence on poetry, drama, art and music.