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.
Your compadre is either the man who stands godfather to your children or to whose children you stood godfather, or, as in many cases, both. Gossip, originally god-sib i.e. god-sibling, was the English equivalent, although perhaps more often used of women.
I found the Decameron (Penguin edition, tr. McWilliam) to be fun reading, and very suitable when you are looking for something to occupy you for ten minutes at a time, as at bedtime or bathroom. The sexual parts are not too surprising: any priests, monks, or nuns which come up are going to rut, one way or another. But the stories are enjoyable (however Griselda [X,10], the least feminist story ever, is not.)
Dubin’s Fabliaux are previewable on GBooks. It’s a bilingual edition, and the translation is lively. BTW, is there a term for the poetic form popular in that era, where the two lines of a rhyming couplet belong to different sentences?
If the idiomatic sense of “compadre” in context is “goombah,” why not translate it thus? I tend to agree with Acocella* that “good buddy” sounds dated. It evokes for me the CB radio craze, w/ “good buddy of mine” rhyming with “breaker one nine.” Yet the google n gram viewer says that “good buddy” has seen a dramatic upsurge in frequency since the Seventies/Eighties, peaking in 2012. So perhaps one is not to trust ones own sense of things?
*Dead almost a year now, but upon close inspection this is not a posthumously-published piece but rather hat apparently working through his stack of back issues with a certain temporal lag.
I’m not sure what the issue is with godfather. As we all know—thanks to Mario Puzo—that term was used by the American mafia (broadly construed) as a calque translation with a similar scope to goombah (OED: “U. S. slang a. A member of a gang of organized criminals; a Mafioso. b. A boss, mentor; occasionally spec. a godfather; also, a crony, buddy.”) but more respectful connotations.
@Brett:
Literally, godfather has one meaning of compare but not the other one that CuConnacht mentioned above.
Figuratively, my fallible understanding of English suggests it doesn’t translate compare at all. In Italian, by the Battaglia definition, the intended meaning is the following.
Approximately: Comrade, friend (implying a sort of unspoken accord, of jocular complicity). — Often, in a sharply negative sense, denoting the partner or accomplice in criminal activities.
In the neutral sense, something like buddy, chum, mate, pal works for me. In the negative sense, maybe crony? Online dictionaries seem to imply that has a neutral sense too, but I’m wholly unused to it.
So perhaps one is not to trust ones own sense of things?
This is the main life lesson taught by LH.
In the neutral sense, something like buddy, chum, mate, pal works for me.
Me too.
Do we know that? AFAIK serious researchers into the history of the American Cosa Nostra think that Puzo actually knew very little about the Mafia at all, beyond a few well-known anecdotes. It seems that the New York families at least simply used “boss” (and those who spoke Italian used rappresentante); the one exception was Joe Bonanno, who took “family” more literally and wanted to be known as “father”. I have never heard or read about an American wiseguy using “godfather”. In the words of Aniello Dellacroce: “Cosa Nostra means that the boss is your boss”.
@Giacomo Ponzetto: I think I see. The complaint is that compare had already lost the original Christian senses of godfather by the fourteenth century?
Interestingly, English had both compadre from the Spanish cognate and compere from French, but neither one has any synonymy with English godfather.
Puzo said that he made up the mafia usage. When he was growing up, ‘Godfather’ was used like English ‘uncle’, a term kids would apply to older adults. After his book became popular, the term was adopted by Italian crime families (in the US at least), making the fiction real.
Interestingly, English had both compadre from the Spanish cognate and compere from French, but neither one has any synonymy with English godfather.
« Interestingly, English had both compadre from the Spanish cognate and compere from French, but neither one has any synonymy with English godfather. »
The Spanish synonym for English godfather is padrino ( for godmother it’s madrina .) I just checked online to be sure and the Italian equivalent of “godfather” is also padrino.
There is no good equivalent in modern English for Spanish compadre (male) or comadre (female) which is the name given to people where one is the godparent of the other one’s child. It works in both directions so if, for example, my best friend were godfather to my child, he would be my compadre but I would be his compadre as well.
It’s a form of address to that person too, so instead of saying, “Hi, Bob” one might say, “Hola, compadre.”
The relationship is important because the role of godparents is important in Catholicism. They hold the child and answer for the child during the baptism ceremony and they technically have certain responsibilities towards the child from then on. If there wasn’t already a closeness before the baptism ( godparents are usually chosen among relatives and good friends, sometimes among people with some influence or importance to the parents ) it often develops from the relationship as compadres. From there we get the extended meanings of pal or good buddy although I think the word usually implies that one of the men really is the other man’s child’s godfather.
I assume things are or were much the same or similar in Italy with compare but Giacomo can confirm or deny.
Conceivably, hypotaxis in modern Western European languages is all due to Latin (though I doubt it, myself), but it seems a bit of a stretch to attribute the many hypotactic constructions in the Kusaal folk story I was just reading to Latin influence …
In the South Texas border Spanglish of my yout’, teenage males might (or might not) address each other as `cu\~nao’, meaning something like, “I fock your seester’, a term of respect among comrades perhaps
@jack morava
They were saying cuñado which literally means, “brother-in-law”. Among some Mexicans it’s used like “bro” or “buddy” in American English. In parts of Northern Mexico people drop the “d” in “-ado” word endings (like in the Caribbean and Andalusia) which is why those teenagers were probably pronouncing it and you were hearing it as cuñao.
For cuñao, Cobos has ‘chum, friend, pal; protégé.’
yes, that was how I understood it (as, formally, brother-in-law : but across anglo/latino ethnic tensions). So, a term used carefully.
We@Brett:
That would be inaccurate. The literal sense survives, probably today and demonstrably in twentieth-century literature. And in fact, Boccaccio’s Decameron provides the first Battaglia citation for the meaning of “godfather to one’s children.”
However, the figurative sense is also attested since the fourteenth century, indeed since before Boccaccio (e.g., in Villani). Thus, when you find the word compare in Italian, you must always figure out if it means godfather, or buddy, or crony.
The claim (whose veracity I cannot judge) is that in some passage of the Decameron Boccaccio meant buddy (or crony), but the translators mistakenly chose godfather instead.
because, as an artist of language, he would be ashamed to say “fuck” five times in one story
i’ve heard this avoidance of repetition described as a specific trait of english stylistics – do folks more widely read in the area than i am have a sense of it as being central to italian style in boccaccio’s time?
The first edition of Cobos has only cuñado, -a, with the same gloss. The second edition has only cuñao.
Pancho, have you encountered cuñada with the ‘friend’ meaning?
No idea about the time dimension, but it’s far from limited to English. Schoolchildren and fully grown journalists writing in German live in constant fear of using a content word* more than once in at least two pages, or of beginning two sentences the same way (that’s harder to avoid in English).
* Including personal names. Many a village is known beyond the next village only because hacks use its demonym as elegant variation for a sportsball player. Admittedly, this is mocked in style guides.
“Pancho, have you encountered cuñada with the ‘friend’ meaning?”
I’m pretty sure that I have but the only instance I can remember right now is second-hand, from a female friend who visited Mexico. She said that at one of the markets the vendors would address her as cuñada.
Also, in my circles it’s not uncommon to address the siblings of girlfriends and boyfriends as cuñado/cuñada, even though the people in question aren’t married. I always felt it was kind of, “jumping the gun”.
That usage is widespread in Western Hemispheric Spanish:
cuñado~-a. m. y f. Ec., El Salv., Méx., Nic., Pan., Par., Perú, P. Rico, R. Dom., Ur. y Ven. U. como fórmula de tratamiento afectivo para dirigirse a los amigos
[https://dle.rae.es/cu%C3%B1ado].
… and is absent from the older dictionaries of Mexican Spanish of Duarte and Santamaría.
@DM: That elegant variation also seems to happen at least in the upper levels of French and Spanish. In a discussion of reverse mortgages and the similar French practice of viager in alt.usage.english a couple years ago, a French participant called Bebercito gave an example from commercial writing:
“Le contrat de vente d’un bien immobilier en viager
Option n°1 : vendre sans transfert de l’obligation de verser la rente
Option n°2 : vendre avec transfert de la charge de verser les arrérages
Option n°3 : vendre avec transfert à un tiers de la charge de verser la rente”
He said that l’obligation de verser la rente is exactly the same thing as la charge de verser les arrérages.
And then there’s the rule, if not a law, that if you’re writing in French or Spanish about someone well-known, you have to use the adjective derived from their name. Any discussion of Juan Ramón Jiménez has to use the word juanramoniano somewhere.
“ … and is absent from the older dictionaries of Mexican Spanish of Duarte and Santamaría.”
Out of curiosity, how old are those dictionaries? Its’s been around since at least the early 90’s because I remember that a couple of coworkers at a job back then would call me cuñado and I don’t remember thinking it unusual so I must have heard it earlier than that.
The former (whose author is properly Ramos y Duarte) was first published in 1895; I checked the second edition, of 1898. Santamaría’s was first published in 1959; I looked at the 6th edition, of 2000.