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Text: Edgar Allan Poe (ed. T. O. Mabbott), “Epigram [From Pulci],” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Vol. I: Poems (1969), p. 211 (This material is protected by copyright)


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[page 211:]

EPIGRAM
[From Pulci]

In “The Bargain Lost” (a draft for Poe's well-known tale “Bon-Bon”), published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, December 1, 1832, Poe mentions “a line from Pulci, thus happily translated by a modern satirist.” No translation of the Morgante Maggiore in the meter used has been found, nor anything close in sentiment in the Italian original. It is to be suspected that the “translator” was Poe himself. The couplet reads:

 

Brethren, I come from lands afar

To show you all what fools you are.

[1831?]

 


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Notes:

Addendum:

  • This minor item must now be removed from the Poe canon. In an e-mail to the Poe Society, dated May 20, 2018, Ton Fafianie identifies the source of these lines as from The Siamese Twins, a Satirical Tale of the Times, with Other Poems by Edward Bulwer (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), p. 30. The context there is one of series of statements made “in wretched Siamese,” and gives no indication of any kind about Luigi Pulci (1432-1484). Consequently, the translation is not by Poe, and the attribution to Pulci is evidently Poe's invention, for his own purposes, perhaps with the intention of misleading.

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[S:1 - TOM1P, 1969] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Editions-The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (T. O. Mabbott) (Epigram [From Pulci])