Columbus, Barlow and the Italian Epigraph

The Italian epigraph to Joel Barlow’s The Columbiad consists of a stanza from the XV book of Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) by Torquato Tasso and represents a central element of the work. It functions in the structure and meaning of the American poem, delineating a dialectical process between Tasso and Barlow’s works, between Europe and America, past and future, knowledge and action. The epigraph forces the reader to reflect on the presence of a foreign language at the outset of a work which, according to the author’s ambition, represents the epic of the New World, the founding literary monument of the United States. From a narratological point of view, there are two different textual levels: the extradiegetic one, Tasso’s quotation; and the diegetic one, the poem itself. Nevertheless, because of the central role of Christopher Columbus—the leitmotif of the epigraph and poem—the two levels interact and intermingle thematically and ideologically. While Tasso’s quotation provides literary autoritas to Barlow’s epos, the poem extends and gives a more complete historical veritas to the former.