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Full Description
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.
Contents
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
