quarta-feira, 8 de janeiro de 2014

The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, tr by Wayne A Rebhorn, review

Boccaccio’s Decameron inspired Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats – and laid the foundations of European fiction

A feast of storytelling: 'The Banquet in the Pinewoods' (1483) by Sandro Botticelli (and workshop), depicting The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, the eighth tale of the fifth day in The Decameron Photo: Bridgemanart.com

By Jonathan Keates

The Decameron is one of the great fountainheads of storytelling. Its astonishing narrative fecundity, its dazzling shifts of mood and style, its deliberate counterpoise of artifice and artlessness, its sense that the plainest of ordinary lives conceals the possibility of something fabulous – all these have made it a mother lode of European fiction. Unlike its Oriental forerunners such as The Arabian Nights, this medieval collection of 100 tales offers nothing in the way of magic, fantasy or shape-changing. Marvels and prodigies spring not from the supernatural but arise instead from the chance and coincidence governing even the best-regulated human existence.

Whether its creator, Giovanni Boccaccio, really wanted contemporary readers in 14th-century Italy to remember him by this work alone is doubtful. By 1350, when the process of assembling it probably began, he had established himself as a master of everything from verse epic and prose romance to pastoral idylls, allegorical visions and fictional autobiography. For Florence’s republican government his way with words made him a natural diplomat, and he was sent on missions to the papal court at Avignon and to Naples, where earlier he had learnt his craft as a writer while trying not too hard to study the banking and accounting to which his father bound him apprentice.

Boccaccio’s native Tuscany provides the setting for The Decameron, its overall framework rooted in Florence during the ravages of the Black Death. Fleeing the plague-stricken city, a group of friends, seven women and three men, seek refuge in a country villa, where they propose “to have as much fun as possible without overstepping the bounds of reason in any way”. Their chief diversion will consist of telling tales on a subject proposed by whichever of them has been nominated as ruler for the day. Nine of these 10 themed anthologies end with the appointment of a new queen or king, who proposes next morning’s topic before commanding one of the companions to sing a song while the others dance. The lyrics themselves always seem to hint at aspects of the singer’s emotional life which he or she prefers to keep hidden, a device implying that the storytellers inhabit their own ongoing narratives, to be included in some Decameron of a future era.

Introducing his fluent and elegant new translation, Wayne A Rebhorn emphasises Boccaccio’s enduring debt to Dante, the writer on whom he lectured to the Florentines and to whose great work The Decameron pays homage in its structure and moral intent as well as in a scatter of echoes from the poem. Like Dante, Boccaccio begins in mid-catastrophe. The plague has struck at the heart of Florentine society, undermined the rule of law and effectively destroyed the world of privilege, ceremony and respect on which the city’s daily rhythms depend. In streets choked with corpses “there were no tears or candles or mourners to honour the dead; on the contrary, it had reached the point that people who died were treated like goats”.

For the ten refugees storytelling in the Tuscan countryside becomes both a therapeutic exercise and a “comedy”, reasserting order, decorum and humanity in a damaged world. Are its participant narrators, with their symbolic names – Fiammetta, “little flame”, Neifile, “newly beloved” and so on – designed to represent the seven cardinal virtues and the Holy Trinity, as some commentators suggest? Or does The Decameron, despite this typically medieval absorption with numbers, emblems and heavenly allegory, stand on the threshold of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on sensory authenticity and the value of everyday experience?

In their sheer abundance and variety the stories themselves, celebrating narrative as an art form, also offer an essential riposte to the idea, cherished by theologies the world over, that all earthly life is simply a sordid prologue to the notional joys awaiting us beyond. Whatever Dante’s benign influence or the impact on Boccaccio of the Christian traditions, it is noteworthy how small a part spirituality seems to play in these tales. Take, for example, the last story, the one we know as “Patient Griselda”, which Chaucer – who may have met Boccaccio on a visit to Italy – put into the mouth of his Oxford scholar in The Canterbury Tales.
This is a “test narrative”, the time-honoured fictional trope in which a character is made to undergo a series of trials designed to prove their integrity and worthiness of a prize others fail to win or for which, in Griselda’s case, society deems them undeserving. A shepherd’s daughter, she is spotted by Gualtieri, Marquis of Saluzzo, who chooses her as his wife. Eminently adaptable, she seems born to be a marchioness but her husband has other ideas. He will test her wifely patience, firstly by removing their infant children from her, then, after several years, by telling her that the Pope has granted him a divorce.
Home goes Griselda, without a murmur, to her father’s cottage, but Gualtieri has prepared worse torments. Now dressed in her peasant homespun, she is summoned to wait on his new bride, who of course turns out to be her long-lost daughter. Gualtieri, admitting the whole deception, offers the lame and unfeeling excuse that “I wanted to teach you how to be a wife and at the same time to beget for myself perpetual peace and quiet for the rest of my life with you”. Griselda’s patience is at no stage presented as that Christian submissiveness commended to wives by St Paul. In greeting her husband’s supposed child-bride she frankly warns him not to subject the girl to a similar ordeal. In his courtiers’ eyes the winner is not the shifty, humbugging Gualtieri but Griselda, possessed of a serene wisdom he will clearly never achieve.
As for those whose job is to teach us piety, virtue and the beauty of holiness, such people, for Boccaccio, are often the likeliest sinners. The nuns of a Tuscan convent, led by their abbess, so enjoy the extra services afforded them by the strapping young gardener Masetto that in order not to wear him out they “divide his labours in such a way that he could take care of them all”, with “quite a few monklets and nunlets” as a result. A wife cheats on her jealous husband with the local priest, an abbot cuckolds a dim-witted yeoman by persuading him that a marvel-working opiate will afford him a glimpse of Purgatory, and in Boccaccio’s native city of Certaldo, Frate Cipolla (Friar Onion) – “the most sociable scoundrel in the world” – peddles dodgy relics to the townsfolk.
Even the most earnest young desert hermit can find no refuge from fleshly imperatives. When Alibech, a Tunisian girl in search of God, finds Rustico at prayer in his cell, he gives her instruction in a spiritual exercise he calls “putting the Devil back into hell”. So adept a pupil exhausts her teacher, but when she returns home with her glad tidings and explains exactly how the Evil One is sent where he belongs, “they laughed so much that they are laughing to this day”.
Beauty as well as bawdy has enthralled The Decameron’s readers over six centuries. Turn to the fifth story of the fourth day (its given theme is unhappy love) where Filomena tells the tragic tale of Lisabetta, whose lover, the apprentice Lorenzo, is murdered by her brothers for the sake of family honour. Its closing image of the grief-crazed heroine weeping over the pot of basil where she has concealed his head inspired John Keats to write “Isabella”. Earlier Shakespeare’s eye had lighted on day three, picking out the exploits of Giletta of Narbonne to transform into All’s Well That Ends Well.
Characters such as Lisabetta and Giletta, steadfast and resourceful, clearly appealed to Boccaccio. Though its three male storytellers are often cynical on the subject of a lady’s constancy and sincerity, The Decameron, addressed mainly to a female audience, continuously rejects the medieval stereotype of Eve and her daughters as begetters of sinfulness. This is a book by a man who loved women and whose empathy with them transcended the culture and prejudices of his age.
It is 700 years since Boccaccio’s death and The Decameron has had numerous English translations, most of them bowdlerised or reliant on corrupt texts. The challenge is to move gracefully between the widely varying idioms employed for different tales and Wayne A Rebhorn is notably successful in handling this, avoiding both an excess of slack colloquialism and the pish-tush-forsooth faux-antique of earlier renderings. His introduction and notes are all we could wish for and the achievement genuinely honours its original. “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” says Shakespeare in his Boccaccio play. All the more reason, says The Decameron, for enjoying it while we can.