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Vernacular Edens

Vernacular Edens

Tropes of Translation in Medieval European Fictions

by Simone Marchesi

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

Digital download
9781487558321
Published: January 2025

Digital download
9781487558314
Published: January 2025

Description
Contents
Authors

Late-medieval European vernacular literature defined itself as the redeployment of classical and post-classical antecedents in new cultural coordinates. Many authors of narrative and poetic fiction between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries resisted the idea that moving a text from one language to another produces a loss of meaning, or, as today’s idiom goes, that something always gets “lost in translation.” Rather, they understood the process of vernacular translation as a regenerative cultural practice and often associated it with depictions of luscious and paradisal gardens in their works.

Vernacular Edens presents a systematic study of a literary commonplace, the representation of gardens in medieval fictions, as a lens to understand the theories and practices of translation from Latin to the vernaculars. The book argues that the prominent narrative space that works composed in Old French, Italian, and Middle English give to garden-visit scenes is connected to their vindication of translation as an always-enriching practice. A wide range of texts from Marie de France’s Lais to the Roman de la Rose, from Dante’s Comedy to Boccaccio’s Decameron, and from Petrarch’s Griselda to Chaucer’s Clerk’s and Merchant’s Tales provide the body of evidence analysed in the book.

Preface
Beyond Babel: The Tower and the Garden

Introduction

1. Frameworks
2. At the Origins of the Trope: Eden and the New Testament
3. Neighbouring Tropes: Tradition and Translation

Chapter 1. Encompassing Imperfection: The Garden of the Rose

1. A Literary Space for Translation: The Authorities of the Rose
2. A Curious Literary Garden: Squaring the Circle
3. Deferring Meaning: False Seeming and the Evangile pardurable

Chapter 2. Animal Instability: Dante’s Theories of Language before and in the Commedia

1. Instabilissima avis: Ornithology and Dante’s Self-Translation
2. Instabilissimum animal: A Brief History of Human Languages
3. Instabilissimus locus: Contingency, Irony, Solidarity in the Cantos 26
4. Instabilissima signa: Dante’s New Linguistic Ecology and the Art of Acrostics
a. Adam’s Edenic Speech
b. The Acrostic of Paradiso 5: An Anti-Babel Fish
Conclusion

Chapter 3. Making Paradise on Earth: The Second Garden of Boccaccio’s Decameron

1. The Intertextual Garden of the Decameron
2. Two Stories for One Place
3. Taking the Cross
Conclusion

Chapter 4. The Old and the New: Chaucer’s Garden of Delight

1. Reversion: Translating in Petrarch’s Griselda and the Clerk’s Tale
2. Elision and Recantation: The Garden of the Merchant’s Tale and Januarie’s Songs
Conclusion

Chapter 5. Looking Back and Looking Forward: Reading Levi Reading Dante

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Simone Marchesi is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at Princeton University. His main research interest is the dialogue established with Latin classics by Italian writers from the medieval period, in particular Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He has published two monographs in this field: Stratigrafie decameroniane (2004) and Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (2011). He has translated into Italian Robert Hollander’s monumental commentary on Dante’s Comedy (2011) and has recently edited the school version of the same commentary (Dante, La Commedia, 2016). His current research concerns medieval ideas about translation, as they are reflected in twelfth-to fifteenth-century vernacular fictions, a study provisionally entitled The Tower and the Garden.