FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009 Translation

Marian Rothstein Carthage College

Translation and the Triumph of French: the Case of the Decameron

In the course of the sixteenth century, the status of translation, espe- cially from other vernaculars, changed dramatically. What had been understood as the state of servile rendering of a pre-existing text turned into the very real possibility of the creation of a French version that, based now on the strength and beauty of French, might claim as much aesthetic merit, as much glory, as the original, even when that original was an Italian classic.

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In the first half of the sixteenth century, translations were often the battlefield in a struggle where the French language took on Latin and Italian in hand-to-hand combat. Latin, once neutral, simply the language of learning, was increasingly associated with the Church or with the successor to — the Empire — both perceived as antag- onists of Gallican traditions. The centuries-old model of a et studii was based on the recognition of the mutability of hu- man affairs: things change, and as a consequence, the center of power, as of learning, shifts in the course of human history. This view, how- ever, is founded on the assumption, inherited from the Roman Impe- rium, that at any given time there is a single center of power or learn- ing — or more clearly in the Roman model, a single center of power and learning. Another, competing paradigm, inherited from Italy, can be seen in starting with the reign of François I (1515-47); it is henceforth clear that worldly power lies not in the hand of one but of several princes. Although the roots of this kind of challenge to the 18 FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Ancients are clearly in Italy, for Italians, the center was moving through time, not space, making it a family matter so to speak in a kind of implied continuum. From the Gallican worldview, the change to multiple centers carries an implicit challenge to the Ro- man/Italian hub, a challenge that takes on a nationalist charge, posit- ing a potential locus of the triumph of French. Where the notion of translatio imperii went, so too did translatio studii, as by 1530, French learning rivaled that of contemporary Italy and was recognized as surpassing it in Greek studies. François Berriot notes that the per- ceived connection between learning and power can be seen a century or more before the period which concerns us here:

La “translatio studii” et la “translation” vont donc de pair, puisque c’est par la traduction que les sciences antiques arrivent à l’université de et dans l’entourage du roi […]. [E]n 1427 Bedford, qui gouverne la France au nom d’Henri VI d’Angleterre, fait très symboliquement emporter outre-Manche le Tite-Live de Charles V. (132)

The spread of printed books changed the nature of learning, both quantitatively and qualitatively. While our modern vocabulary sepa- rates scholarship and literary works, the sixteenth-century terms, bo- nas litteras, belles lettres, do not make such a distinction and so would include both as objects of a translatio studii. Far from the modern dream that it be the transparent conveyance of ideas from one lan- guage to another, translation could be potentially an act of appropriation. Under these circumstances, the translation into French of an Ancient or an Italian classic may well be a declaration of intent to outdo, as it were, to conquer. It is in this light that I propose here to examine the case of Boccaccio’s Decameron crossing the Alps. Although a vernacular work, the Decameron was a recognized classic of Italian literature. The very idea that a vernacular literature might have classics is a step along the road of the change away from the view of literary history in which the first is axiomatically the best — a view that had left Renaissance authors deep in the shadow of their Classical predecessors. Humanists’ understanding of the Ancients undercut this by placing them increasingly in a specific cultural context so that they were understood as writing in time, in their own time (even as Virgil, and certainly Homer, continued to be understood allegorically, out of time). Indeed, this attitude made translation more clearly a cultural conquest, since culture might be translated alongside