So far, I’m not a big fan of Petrarch’s. In the letter, he seemed to slap Boccaccio with some indirect-but-backhanded comments, ie: suggesting that Petrarch has much more serious work to attend to than to be writing in the vernacular as Boccaccio has. And he eventually goes on to completely (I believe) misinterpret Boccaccio’s story.

In reading the notes at the end of our edition, you find that many Biblical allusions are made within the story. At one point, Griselda is likened to the Virgin Mary, and at another Job. Of course! That’s exactly what this was– a sort of retelling of Job. A woman is, after all, supposed to love and support her husband as part of her service to God.

The kicker is when, upon completing the story, Dioneo denounces Gualtieri for his behavior. So… if Gualtieri’s actions are representative (albeit on a small scale) of God’s (ie: Job), and Griselda’s patience, faith and constancy was being tested… yet Gualtieri is a big butthead…? In a way I want to read this as a Boccaccio-angry-with-God story, but I can’t. As Kathryn pointed out yesterday, Boccaccio’s disillusionment seems aimed at the clergy, though Boccaccio doesn’t seem to have difficulty in separating the actions of the clergy with faith in God.

So this leads me to believe that this story is in the same vein: Boccaccio is not saying that God is a butthead– I don’t think– but rather that this sort of reasoning is ridiculous, the sort of reasoning used by the clergy.

And Kennedy arrives…

From the very beginning of Vita Nuova, I get that Dante has elevated Beatrice beyond just Beatrice, some girl he bumped into a couple of times during her life. Rather Beatrice becomes a heavenly entity through Dante’s work. In fact, early on I believe he actually refers to her as a god(dess)– in one of the phrases that required a translated footnote. Dante even devotes an entire section or two of Vita Nuova to the dazzling effect Beatrice has on the people who encounter her, almost as a religious experience. When Dante encounters pilgrims, his first thought is that they must know nothing of the death of Beatrice, the tragedy that his town has suffered. (His second thought is an almost haughty assertion that, were he able to communicate his plight to the pilgrims, Dante could certainly cause them to weep. A little sick, yes?)

What is interesting then, is what this belief does to his poetry. The sole purpose of his work is to praise Beatrice who sustains Dante, even after her death. Love, then, becomes Dante’s religion, Beatrice is his god(dess) and his poetry is his prayer. Granted, courtly “love” thrives on this sort of extreme devotion, but what pushes Dante’s case over the edge, then, is the Divine Comedy.

Truth be told, my knowledge of the Divine Comedy before starting the Inferno was (is) limited. I get the gist, but what is interesting after reading Vita Nuova is Dante’s approach to describing this tour of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Dante asks Virgil how it is that he obtained permission to see what becomes of the soul before actually dying, and Virgil explains that Beatrice requested it. This answer is sufficient for Dante, thus likening Beatrice to God again. It is through poetry– represented by Virgil– that Beatrice’s message to Dante is communicated and her wishes executed. As far as Dante is concerned, Beatrice is the keeper of the afterlife. What’s more, a footnote early on in the Inferno points out that Dante rarely if ever (I don’t remember which) refers to Christ or the Virgin Mary; Dante has no need of these traditional religious figureheads as he has Beatrice.

At times it seems that Dante is attempting to translate his praise of Beatrice into praise of God, her creator, but the references relating them are few and far between, as if the use of “God” were only for emphasis. I wonder if Dante’s obsession with Beatrice would not be seen at the time as idolatry? But then again, it was not Catholicism that was quick to condemn idolatry, so perhaps not. It seems there is a fine line between traditional courtly love and idolatry, if there is a line at all, and if so, where is it drawn?

You could slit my throat
And with my one last gasping breath
I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt
Taking Back Sunday

Granted, I haven’t completely finished the reading yet, so if he learns his lesson in the very end I don’t know it yet. And granted, given the choice the lady refuses to leave with Tristram and wants to return to her husband, but that’s after she’s already been getting it on with him. In my mind this seems to be pretty dismissive of chastity.

I haven’t finished reading the essay yet, but I wanted to go ahead and post it before we run out of time.

So far, so good. Becker proposes (so far) that Camilla takes a place of honor toward the end of the Aeneid, “undercutting” Turnus’s character. She commands the reader’s attention by commanding the attention of those surrounding her within the story. Sure.

But then I get confused. The essay talks about Camilla as a character being the embodiment of the general confusion of the Aeneid. Granted, I read a chunk of the Eneas the other night like everyone else, but I can’t say I completely understand that theory– not yet anyway. I suppose I’d have to actually break down and do the reading.

It would seem then, that this particular work is placing duty above even love, and perhaps this also follows the idea of literature of this tradition actually serving as a critique of love for anything other than one’s God. During this time period especially, one’s God goes hand-in-hand with one’s duty. It is because of duty alone that the knight is persuaded to sleep with the damsel, preferring however to keep himself chaste, to avoid betrayal of his beloved, and to honor his God, all on varying levels.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the damsel turns out to be the ultimate nagging “I-was-just-testing-you” psycho. All else pales in comparison to the knight’s true love, especially this nutjob. As difficult as it is to be painfully irritating within such simple sentence structure, the damsel manages; the only acceptable acts she performs are offering to leave the knight’s bed and offering to return home.

That said, I’ve only read the first chunk so far, so if I’m missing something huge that’s relevant to all of this, you know why.

More interesting, to steal from Dr. K, is that this Arabic-influenced scene is how the author/translator chooses to handle Camilla’s death. As Dr. K says, Camilla is a woman warrior. She is powerful, and yet beautiful. For the time, this was impossible to wrap one’s mind around, so the author not only places her in a tomb, distanced by death, but an elaborate, flamboyant structure at that, which is tinged with the exotic, thereby placing Camilla just out of reach. This elaborate description, not only of materials but also the ever-present bow-and-arrow and the destruction of any stairs allowing access to the tomb, sets Camilla apart as a phenomenon more than a person, discouraging any attempt to “understand” the woman warrior by exalting her and doing so through “foreign” practices.

When Dronke goes into the issue of translation, I perk up. In hindsight everything is a phenomenon, and we are able to distance ourselves sufficiently to “study” the past. The warnings that history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t pay attention the first time around is crap; we’re going to repeat it, it’s just a matter of time before we get cocky enough to think that certain events and practices are simply of the past and that we are now more sophisticated.

Certain tendencies are part of “human nature,” if you’ll excuse the cliché. One of these tendencies is stealing ideas from another group (ahem, culture) due to their exotic appeal, among other things. (I realize I’m being reductionist and that there are a million and one reasons to steal from other cultures, but bear with me.) Another extremely significant tendency is storytelling. Therefore, it is only natural, not to mention inevitable, that one culture should appropriate the stories (among other things) of other groups or cultures, and what’s more that they should alter these ever-so-slightly to make them relevant to their daily life.

Case in point: I made a feeble attempt at translating “The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man” for my boyfriend. Not in a grand display of my mastery of Spanish, but as a necessity as he is low on his English. He is a devout Christian, and upon reading this story I thought I have so got to show this to him. The characters involved are Muslim, but the moral is universal… or so I thought. As I was translating, which took much longer than I could ever have imagined, I came upon the first mention of “Allah”. Hmm. While I could have simply translated it to Dios to serve my purposes, I left it at Alá for the sake of staying as close to the “original” as possible. When I later shared my rough translation with my boyfriend, I was quite proud of the time and effort I had put into the small project and I thought for sure that he would fall in love with the story and the moral like I had, maybe tack it up on his wall. I warned him, “It’s from Arabian Nights so they’re using ‘Allah’ but I think it’s pretty universal.” As I finished reading my translation aloud, I looked to my Christian friend for a reaction, fairly proud of myself… whereupon he wrinkled his forehead and said, “There is no God but God; Allah is the devil.”

So it seems that he has some sort of block against even acknowledging elements of another faith. And what if I had simply translated the word “Allah” to “Dios“? And what if I even threw Christ in the story somewhere? I was amused when I realized that I was doing the very same thing that probably goes into these collections of stories in the first place, only I wasn’t quite as smart. While I was asking for an opening of the mind and an acceptance of the ideas of another culture as parallel to our own, it seems that what I should have done in order to get my point across would have been to take the story and change the necessary elements to make it a Christian story. Tah-dah! Then it still means the same thing, but my oh-so-devout boyfriend could accept and appreciate it.

While this feels only slightly disingenuous to a student of English literature accutely aware of the issues in translation, the same has been occuring for centuries. The borrowing of stories is nothing new, and even the stories