PARIZ UN VIENE

PARIZ UN VIENE , 16^th-century Yiddish epic. Until the recent discovery of a complete copy of the Verona 1594 edition, whose preface mentions Elia Levita (Elye Bokher/Bachur) apparently as the author's mentor, the poem was conventionally attributed to Levita. That attribution thus now seems at least complicated (for it might well be an elaborately ironic subterfuge – certainly not unthinkable for Levita) if not altogether untenable. Pariz un Viene nonetheless clearly derives from and participates in the same north Italian Renaissance cultural milieu in which Levita wrote his *Bove-Bukh, and like that text, this one is also an adaptation of an Italian romance into Yiddish (717 ottava rima stanzas in 10 cantos). Here, however – unlike Levita's masterfully entertaining but hardly intellectually ambitious Bove-Bukh – the Yiddish version utterly transforms its source into a veritable masterpiece of Renaissance or quasi-Humanist poetic narrative, directly influenced, for instance, by Ariosto's Orlando furioso. The conventional plot of the vassal's son who must prove himself before being granted the princess as his bride is transformed from hackneyed cliché into a complexly layered and dramatically progressing, politically serious, and delightfully humorous tour de force.

bibliography:

Ch. Shmeruk, Prokim fun der Yidisher Literatur-Geshikhte (1988), 97–120; A.M. Babbi, in: Quaderni di Lingue e Letterature (Verona), 11 (1986), 393–97; V. Marchetti et al. (eds.), Elia Bahur Levita, Paris un Viene, Francesco Dalle Donne, Verona 1594 (1988; facsimile Verona 1594]; Ch. Shmeruk, Pariz un Vyenah: Mahadurah bi-Kortit be-Tseruf Mavo, He'arot ve-Nispaḥim (1996); A. Schulz, Die Zeichen des Körpers und der Liebe: 'Paris und Vienna' in der jiddischen Fassung des Elia Levita (2000); J.C. Frakes (ed.), Early Yiddish Texts: 1100–1750 (2004), 393–414; J. Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature (2005), 186–206.

[Jerold C. Frakes (2^nd ed.)]