La secchia rapita
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La Secchia Rapita (The stolen bucket) is a mock-heroic epic poem by Alessandro Tassoni, first published in 1622. Later successful mock-heroic works in French and English were written on the same plan.
The battle of the books
Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, in his Istoria della Volgar Poesia (1698), records his doubt whether the invention of the heroicomic poem ought to be ascribed to Tassoni, but instead to Francesco Bracciolini. Though the latter's Lo Scherno degli Dei (The Mockery of the Gods) was printed four years after La Secchia, he claimed in the epistle prefixed to it that he had written his some years earlier. Crescimbeni adds that, because Tassoni had severely ridiculed the Bolognese, Bartolomeo Bocchini (1604-1648/53), to revenge his countrymen, published from Venice in 1641 a poem in the same vein with the title Le Pazzie dei Savi (The Madness of the Wise), or alternatively the Lambertaccio, in which the Modenese are spoken of with contempt.
Tassoni's mock-heroic manner was also found a fruitful model by Boileau, whose Le Lutrin (The Lectern, 1674-83) recounts a feud between the priest and the choirmaster of a French church. There the priest tries to position a reading-desk so as to obscure his rival from the sight of the congregation in a conflict that ends with champions of both sides gathering in a bookstore to pelt each other with books.
Boileau's work has been seen as the model for Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. But the coincidence of a simultaneous translation of Tassoni's work by John Ozell has also led to the claim that La Secchia Rapita might have served Pope as a more direct model.
Pope's poem originally appeared anonymously in 1712 and Ozell's translation of the first two cantos of La Secchia Rapita was published the following year as The Trophy Bucket: An heroi-comical poem. The first of the kind. Made English from the original Italian of Tassoni. Following the great success of Pope's expanded five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock in 1714, this time under his own name, Ozell's publisher seized the opportunity to profit from its popularity by retitling his translation The Rape of the Bucket in a "second edition" in 1715.
In 1825 the linguist James Atkinson published an ottava rima translation of the whole of Tassoni's poem. In his introduction, while acknowledging the general assumption that the poem is known "as the model upon which the Rape of the Lock of Pope, and the Lutrin of Boileau are conceived", goes on to comment that "there is little of similarity among them. The Secchia Rapita indeed differs essentially from the Rape of the Lock, both in spirit, and execution. There is nothing in the latter that can be compared with the humour of the former, or with the admirably grotesque pictures with which it abounds".
