Acocella on Boccaccio.

Jamais deux sans trois: here’s another post about translation, featuring Joan Acocella’s New Yorker review (archived) of Wayne A. Rebhorn’s new translation of the Decameron. After discussing the Black Death that serves as its backdrop, she summarizes the book itself and then its author’s life:

Boccaccio was not a noble; he was one of the nuova gente, the mercantile middle class, whose steady rise since the twelfth century the nobles feared and deplored. Boccaccio’s father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a merchant, and he expected Giovanni to join the trade. Giovanni was born illegitimate, but Boccaccino acknowledged him. When the boy was thirteen, Boccaccino moved from Florence to Naples to work for an important counting house, and he took his son with him, to learn the business: receive clients, oversee inventory, and the like. Boccaccio did not enjoy this work, and so his indulgent father paid for him to go to university, to study canon law. Boccaccio didn’t like that, either, but during this time he read widely. (The Decameron is, unostentatiously, a very learned book.) He also began to write: romances in verse and prose, mostly. With those literary credits, plus his father’s contacts, he gained entry to Naples’s Angevin court, whose refinements seeped into his work. He later said that he had never wanted to be anything but a poet. In Naples, he became one, of the late-medieval stripe. These were the happiest years of his life.

When he was in his late twenties, they came to an end. […]

Then she moves on to analysis, which is more interesting:

The dominant notes of the Decameron are this realism and cheer and disorderliness, but, whatever you say about the book, something else arises to contradict you. Though Boccaccio insists on Renaissance earthiness, he makes room for elegant medievalisms. The young people often join hands and do the carola, a circle dance born of the Middle Ages. They also, now and then, between tales, deliver long, ornate speeches, full of medieval rhetorical flourishes. You may weary of these refinements and long to get back to the nice, rude tales, but the tension between the two modes is fundamental to the Decameron.

But of course what made me want to post it was the stuff about language:

Finally, the high spirits of the Decameron have political force. They help make the book proto-democratic. Boccaccio probably wasn’t trying to raise the humble. Yet, because he clearly liked these people, he did raise them. Most of Boccaccio’s compliments to ordinary folk are in the form of language—for example, his bright, piquant presentation of their slang. They seem to have a hundred lovely metaphors, with a donkey or a bucket or whatever, for everything in life. And, however improper the goings on in the Decameron, the language is almost never filthy. An instructive companion volume to Rebhorn’s Decameron is the recent “Fabliaux” (Liveright), translated by Nathaniel E. Dubin, and described by R. Howard Bloch, in the introduction, as the first substantial collection of fabliaux, in any language, for today’s general reader. Fabliaux are comic tales, in verse, composed between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, typically in northern France. Most of them are anonymous. They are, Bloch writes, the “first important expression of European literary realism”; they tell us how the citizens of that period actually lived—how they ate and dressed and slept and did their hair. Most of the tales also describe, not politely, how people had sex, and dealt with bathroom matters. Glancing down the table of contents of Dubin’s volume, we find the following titles: “The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk,” “The Piece of Shit,” “The Mourner Who Got Fucked at the Grave Site,” “The Peasant’s Fart.” The words used here have not been adjusted to conform to modern immodesty; the translation is literal. In “The Piece of Shit,” a man actually eats one, though it’s his wife’s, and small.

This is fun, until you get tired of it. A fuck is always a “fuck,” regardless of what was presumably one episode’s difference from another. Likewise, the sentence structure is paratactic: ABCD. The knight said such-and-such; then the peasant said such-and-such; then his wife said such-and-such. To this, Boccaccio is like a castle to a cave. He is probably Western literature’s foremost master of sexual euphemism. His lovers grind at the mill; they give the wool a whacking; they make the nightingale sing. Boccaccio does this not because he is abashed by his material but because, as an artist of language, he would be ashamed to say “fuck” five times in one story. Even more intelligent is his syntax. Because the knight said such-and-such, the peasant said such-and-such, even though his wife had previously said such-and-such. This is the kind of sentence structure that was handed down to us by Latin, and that Western people, whether or not they ever studied Latin, recognize as their own.

Italians before Boccaccio had written prose in a sophisticated form. Dante was the first truly distinguished practitioner, but his monumental work, the Divine Comedy, is written in verse, not prose. “Art” fiction in prose took centuries to come of age, because medieval writers, like the ancients, considered prose inferior to verse for the purposes of imaginative literature. Today, it is the primary medium of literary writing: novels, short stories. In Italy, the pioneer of that change was Boccaccio. In the words of one critic, “It is no exaggeration to say that Boccaccio almost by himself established the Italian language as an effective and supple medium for prose.”

The other remarkable feature of Boccaccio’s language is that, while its structure may be inherited from Latin, the words are Italian. In his time, many educated people still regarded the language of everyday life as too rough a medium for an ambitious piece of writing. Most literary works were in Latin. In Italy, the banner-carrier in the campaign against this policy was, again, Dante. The Divine Comedy was written in the Florentine dialect. Boccaccio worshipped Dante—he gave the name “divine” to the poem that Dante called, simply, the “comedy”—and eagerly followed his example. Others, in turn, copied him. More and more books were written in the common tongue and (as was not the case with Dante) about commoners. From that seedbed grew the idea that the lives of ordinary people could be described in literary language, and thereby ennobled.

Rebhorn’s translation of the Decameron is a thoughtful piece of work, with populist intentions. He believes that Boccaccio’s Latinate syntax, with its cargo of subordinate clauses and phrases, cannot be reproduced fluently in modern English, so he sometimes breaks up a sentence. Again with a concern for the common reader, he has tried to make the slang sound natural, and he succeeds. His slang is dated, though (“muttonhead,” “tuckered out”). Also, he repeatedly runs into the problem of having to combine low language with high. […] It should be said, though, that Rebhorn, in his endnotes, explains his decisions. He tells us a lot more as well. When Boccaccio describes a baker, Cisti, whose shop was next to the Chiesa di Santa Maria degli Ughi, Rebhorn tells us that in 1300 there was, in fact, a baker named Cisti, whose shop was situated there. He relays the going wisdom: Genoese are misers; Florentines are sly; Perugia is full of homosexuals. He explains the jokes. In one story, there is an ugly man named Scannadio. In the notes, we find out that the man’s name means “he slits the throat of God.” A lot of this information we didn’t need, but it is in endnotes, not footnotes. We don’t have to read them. We should, though. They are a secret message, about Rebhorn’s love of the Decameron, and the years and years of work he spent on it.

Rebhorn’s translation, of course, is not the only one in print. In 1977, Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, both of whom are now distinguished professors emeriti at Indiana University, brought out a version that, unlike Rebhorn’s, does not bend over backward to make things easy for the reader. In their introduction, they proudly tell us that they have not hacked up Boccaccio’s periodic sentences into prose “reminiscent of the style of Ernest Hemingway.” Nor did they make Rebhorn’s effort to modernize the old, idiomatic vocabulary. They translate compare as “godfather”—that is, the man who stood up for you at your baptism, and said that you would abjure the Devil and all his works—which is not at all what Boccaccio meant. He meant “goombah,” as in northern New Jersey. Rebhorn renders it as “good buddy,” which, as usual with his slang, is out of date but accurate.

In her final paragraph she says that “Boccaccio is a premier example of that rare species, the one-great-book great writer.” I confess I’ve only read a few selections; I hope I someday make time to read more of him.