Author: Tassoni, Alessandro
Biography:
TASSONI, Alessandro (1565-1635: NBG)
In his preface to La Secchia Rapita: or, The Rape of the Bucket (1825), the translator James Atkinson (q.v.) affirms that although he had heard of an earlier English translation he had not seen it, and that the only versions of the poem that he had been able to find where he was working, in Calcutta, India, were the Venice editions (in Italian) of 1747 and 1813—both of which included the valuable apparatus of Gaspare Salviani first published in 1642. The earlier English translation had been made by John Ozell (d 1743) and published in 1710. It was generally considered a prototype for Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712), although Atkinson disagreed with that view. Tassoni was born on 28 Sept. 1565 in Modena, Italy. Of good family, he was orphaned early but was well educated at Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara. In 1597 he went to Rome and became Secretary to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, whom he accompanied to Spain in 1600-3 and whose properties in Italy he managed until Colonna’s death in 1608. During this period, perhaps in hope of preferment, he entered the priesthood. He was unlucky in later patrons until he entered the service of Cardinal Ludovisi in 1626 and after his death in 1632 accepted a position at the court of Modena, with rooms in the ducal palace, as counsellor to the Duke. He died at Modena on 25 Apr. 1635 and was buried at the church of San Pietro. His will included a very small bequest—to spend at taverns--to a boy whose mother said he was Tassoni’s illegitimate son. The Secchia Rapita, a burlesque account of the war between Bologna and Modena in 1249, his best known work, was composed in 1611 and published in Paris in 1622 under the pseudonym Aldrovinci Melisone; other more learned and academic works include controversial critiques of Homer, Aristotle, and Petrarch. (NBG 44 cols 920-23; Encyclopedia Britannica [1911] 26: 446) HJ