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…

I don’t know if I’m just a sucker for fairy tales or what, but I don’t think I could even begin to doubt Lancelot and the Queen’s love. And while Lancelot continuously sacrifices for his love, I feel like the Queen sacrifices and suffers as well. Even though the story doesn’t end with them together, they are still able to be near in each and continue to hope for a chance at some recognition of love.

The other thing I really liked about this tale is that all of our favorite characters come around. Arthur’s hanging out, Gawain’s the trusty best friend, the usual love interest is there in the Queen, and the evil forces take the shapes of men, dwarfs, and skeezy women. It’s like our own soap opera on paper. I think I even recall a scene in the story as a scene in the movie “A Knight’s Tale” with the ever-ruggedly handsome Heath Ledger.

The only character I really truly don’t like is Kay. Why is he such a pansy? And why in the world did King Arthur think it was a good idea to entrust Kay with the Queen? He’s the biggest loser I ran across in this story. Even when Meleagant has his arm chopped off, he continues to fight out of pride.

Lastly, I laughed when the narrator has to say, “But their joy will not be revealed by me, for in a story, it has no place.” So, he can’t talk about them having sex, I would guess?

Three cheers for Lancelot. Are we sure this type of guy doesn’t exist anymore?

To begin with, “TSM” made Spain sound like one of those angry kids in highschool who beat up all of the gay kids because he himself was gay. The two cultures seemed to get along for a while until Spain freaked out about its cultural instability. I love that it is the homosexual’s fault for all of Spain’s problems. But the real ringer was the idea that homosexuality was a “Virus Oriental” and therefore curable. Now where have we heard that before?

What strikes me as odd is the fact that some Arabs were just as disgusted with the idea of same-sex intimacy as the Spanish Christians. However it seems that the Sodomitic Moore became too strong of a bad guy. It was the potent signifer of cultural, sexual, and racial diference that the two cultures recognized.

There is also the idea of the Moors being too indulgent (Moor+heaven=tons of food) so they become homosexual pagans. I’m still a little muddled as to how the image of the gay Moor came to be but from the reading I have gathered that it was mainly the evils of propaganda that forever soiled their image. There was a deliberate confustion of cultural and sexual differences in Sodomy. My favorite line from this work is that the image of the Sodmitic Moors was a “by-product of the forgoing sexual, cultural, and gender difference into a servicable discourse by which the Christians might expose the “enemy within.” I thnk that pretty much means point and gasp at the homosexuals and they’re bound to give in.

Now onto “Chaste Subjects” which I think was a stretch and a half on the author’s part. It was like she was looking at a poem about flowers and analyzing its affect on the price of oil. I mean, come on. Yes, a chaste knight is odd. And yes, the devil did dress up as beautiful woment to try and seduce the pious young knights. But to insinuate a homosexual undertone and quesitoning of sexuality was a bit much.

I am totally on board with the oddness of having Chaste knights. It defeats the whole purpose. A knight goes for adventure to get sex from the greatful dame later on. To not accept the sex disrupts the cycle in which chivalrich prowess is rewarded. Sex is a reward for the exploits and battles are a way to prove chivalric prowess. to overcome the temptations of flesh demonstrates the defining relationhip of gender and desire. These ideas make sense. I can see them in my head and they connect quite well.

But then suddenly, the author pulls this ide out of her hat that the shifting, uncertain gender of the devil is an object of deire for the poor knight. At one point she states that the knights establish that fighting is with men, sex is with women. But then she does this whole analysis about the devil chanign sexes and how that maesses with gender  roles and yadda yadda yadda, something about using the figure of women to verbalize the concerns of the church and I’m scratching my head. She may not come out and say it but I felt that she was hinting to the confusions of sexuality with this devil and the relationship the knight feels toward it. I think that was just a bit much. These men deire to not deisre. That’s that.

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

The stories themselves deal with magic and things that would be outside the experiance of the average Muslim of the time period.  Now they most likely believed in things like magic and jinnis.  This was so that they would have something or someone to blame when the unexpected happened.

One of my favorite stories so far is “The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince.”  Which is told to the king from “The Fisherman and the Jinni.”  In this story, the prince marries his cousin (lots of intermarrying going on amoung cousins and siblings it seems) and he is as happy as a lark with his wife and he thinks that she feels the same way about him.  When he overhears two servants talking about how his wife drugs him every night so that she can be with her lover, he gets angry and decides to kill him.  (Also the lovers are almost always black slaves, wonder why that is.)  Instead he only managed in maiming the slave and cause the slave to loose his voice.  Now the wife goes into mourning and has her lover put inside a shire of some kind so she can take care of him.  After three years of this, the prince gets pissed about all her moaning and wailing and tells her to shut up already and get over it. 

When the wife realizes that her husband is the one who hurt her lover she casts a spell on him that turns the bottom part of his body to stone and all the people within his kingdom to fish.

Enter the king from the Fisherman’s story. The king finds the prince and listens to the entire sorid affair and then decides to help this prince.  He goes and kills the wife’s black slave lover and takes his place within the shire.  When the wife comes back she does not seem to notice that her lover is now a white man and is able to speak now.  The king tricks the wife into freeing the prince and his people and is then killed by the king.

As in a lot of Shahrazad’s stories, the women are all beautiful (and only 5′ tall) and the men, and the majority of the men are either royal or in positions of power. (Which only make sense, as Shahrazad is telling the stories to a king and he would want to here about other kings and princes.)   She uses magic to explain the unexplainable and to further the idea that such things do happen and that there is a reason for most magic and that magic has a logic all its own.

Shahrazad manages to keep King Shahryar enthralled by her stories for three years and in that time she gives birth to two sons, thus continuing both her bloodline as well as the kings.  And she gets to keep her head at the end of it.

Another reason these stories may be linked is the simple fact that when people travel together, they will talk and exchange ideas as well as stories to ease the bordom of the trip.  This is true even in our own culture, only now we use DVD players instead of storytellers.

On to “History of 12-century Philosophy.”  I agree with badspeller about all the name dropping, like he said in class today. (Sorry, can’t think of your name at the moment.)  Anyway, Dronke, seems to like the sound of his own voice, and he says a great deal, using elaborate language, so that he can seem above those of us who must suffer through his writing. 

Dronke has a few interesting points about how the Arab culture has influnced the western way of thinking.  He also has a great deal to say about how the works were translated and how the lingusit at the time did not do a very good job of it.  Of course this is true even today if you have a piece of literature translated from its original language to another, you are always going to loose some meaning simply because the person translating the text will do so in his/her own fashion.