This translation of Boccaccio's incomplete commentary on the Divine Comedy is thoughtful and accurate. For the text and some portion of the notes, it relies on the critical edition of the Expositions completed by Giorgio Padoan in 1965. [1] The volume also offers an extensive, updated bibliography on the work as well as two useful indices: one to recurring terms and names, the other to quotations from major authors in Boccaccio's commentary. In the notes to the translation Papio gives explanations of difficult passages, internal references, cross-references both of Boccaccio's sources and of other works by the author, and references to criticism on key passages. The notes are quite extensive and occupy over one hundred pages at the end of the volume. The thirty-page introduction, entitled "Boccaccio as Lector Dantis," tackles the difficult work from the perspective of Boccaccio's cult of Dante that culminates in the Expositions.
As Papio announces at the end of the introduction, his translation tries to preserve "within reason" the eclectic style of the original (35). In fact, even the sentence structure of the English translation bears a striking resemblance to that of the original. For clarity in English, the translator thankfully shortens the sentence length and modernizes the punctuation often. To cite an indicative example, here is how Papio renders a sentence from Boccaccio's telling of Dido's story:
When the poor sailors heard this, although leaving their homeland seemed to them to be a grievous thing, their great fear of Pygmalion's cruelty helped make it simple to agree to follow her wherever she made up her mind to go. (265; 5.lit.70)
La qual cosa udendo i miseri marinai, quantunque loro paresse grave cosa lasciar la patria, nondimeno, temendo forte la crudeltà di Pigmalione, agevolmente s'accordarono a doverla seguire in qualunque parte ella diliberasse di fuggire. (Padoan, 297)
Papio keeps the position of the long apostrophe that begins with quantunque presumably in order to mimic the syntax of the original, even if this is not the most fluid style in the target language. Yet, he changes the gerund temendo into a more readable substantive in English. With its concatenation of verbs, however, the final part of the sentence is at least as complicated as the original. Papio, indeed, succeeds throughout in translating the often obscure and stylistically eclectic Italian prose into an understandable, yet extremely faithful, English.
Papio's critical apparatus to his translation is very strong. He relies to some extent on the erudition available in Padoan's bibliographical and historical notes, but he updates them when necessary and removes Padoan's philological comparison of manuscripts and linguistic clarifications, reducing the girth of the notes in general and making them more useful to an Anglophone audience. Instead of quoting the text of a reference at length, as Padoan does, he merely points the reader to it, opting instead to use the space to explain Boccaccio's use of concepts such as the Horatian dictum, qui miscuit utile dulci (605, n. 3), or the definition of grace by Thomas Aquinas (617, n. 34). Such notes are of a much greater value to the interdisciplinary medievalists, in English, History, and Theology, to whom this translation is most likely marketed.
Most of the intertextual cross-references repeat notes from Padoan's edition, though it is clear that Papio has double-checked his predecessor's claims and in some cases corrected, updated, or expanded on them. For example, when Boccaccio cites Aeneid 6.323-4 on the river Styx (349; 7.lit.100), Padoan merely mentions the line number of the poem and cross-references the same quotation in the Boccaccio's major humanist work, the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium (Padoan, 893, n. 119). Papio, however, gives an extensive note that compares Boccaccio's commentary with the earlier one by Pietro Alighieri and cross-references to Aquinas' commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Servius, the three Vatican mythographers, and critical works on fourteenth-century defenses of poetry (668, n. 67). Notes of this kind really mark Papio's work as a valuable contribution to a variety of fields. In the wake of studies on the commentary tradition, his translation opens up Boccaccio's commentary as a whole to a non-Italophone community of medievalists, especially students.
In the introduction to the translation (4-37) Papio does a good job of presenting Boccaccio as the best of the earliest readers of the Divine Comedy. He responds to the tepid critical reception of the Expositions by defining the commentary as a "hermeneutic watershed" in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (3- 4). Papio contextualizes the Expositions primarily by quoting a series of sonnets that Boccaccio wrote at the end of his life about his disillusion over the public reception of his lectures. He claims that Boccaccio did not leave his commentary unfinished because of health problems (as is commonly believed), but because "he felt that he had tarnished the splendor of its innate beauty by exposing it to men who could not understand it" (7). Thus, according to Papio, Boccaccio's sonnets on his lectures are a Petrarchan palinode to his earlier faith in vernacular poetry as an ethical and political mode of discourse that could function in Florence's Republican political arena (9). His public experiment had the effect opposite to that for which he had hoped, and so he abandons it when he realizes that "the common man does not possess the education and the sensibilities that are needed to behold the truth concealed beneath the integumentum" (33).
Papio goes on to contextualize historically how Boccaccio came to be the first official Dante scholar of Florence, the manner of composition, and the troubled reception and diffusion of the commentary up through the twentieth century. There is a large section of the introduction (14-21) dedicated to Boccaccio's understanding of poetry (and myth) as a kind of theology. The reviewer found the final section of the introduction (21-35) the most useful in its presentation of the procedural method of Boccaccio's commentary and of the genre of the text. Papio explains the relationship between the literal and allegorical senses of the text, and gives a brief but informed description of the kinds of allegorical interpretation with which Boccaccio would have been familiar. He contextualizes Boccaccio's work in terms of patristic, scholastic, and humanist opinions about the role of poetry in religious and intellectual life.
The primary merit of the introduction from the point of view of this reviewer is its sincere presentation of Boccaccio as the first and most dedicated scholar of Dante's masterpiece. Papio clearly identifies with the sincerity and seriousness with which Boccaccio understood the message of Dante's poem. The harshness of his words in the sonnets against the public who had received poorly his lectures on Dante, Papio concludes, "should in no case be read as a recantation of the diligence and sincerity of Boccaccio, the lector Dantis" (35).
My one concern with the introduction is that it unnecessarily buttresses Boccaccio's status as scholar by linking him with Francesco Petrarca. One gets the idea that Boccaccio depends in his intellectual endeavors entirely on the thought of his fellow humanist (e.g. in the discussion of allegory on pp. 27-28). According to Papio, Boccaccio's Expositions are the product of humanistic notions about the nobility of poetic discourse and of ancient civilization that Boccaccio inherited from Petrarca. In recent Boccaccio criticism, however, the tension between the two humanists over the value of vernacular literature generally, and over the importance of the Comedy in particular, has become a topic of much discussion. [2] That Boccaccio was invested in monumentalizing Dante is widely accepted, but the employment of Petrarchan, or more generally humanist, notions about the value of poetry within a vernacular project such as the Expositions could be seen as undermining Petrarca's consistently Latinate humanism. Thus, a more nuanced presentation of the intellectual relationship between Petrarca and Boccaccio and a more in-depth contextualization of the place of the Expositions in proto-humanist polemics over vernacular poetry would have been appreciated.
In sum, this is a diligent translation with many useful notes and a well-done bibliography and index. The introduction provides the reader with a portrait of Boccaccio, the humanist scholar, who tries in vain to peddle the sommo poeta to the masses. Although he might by-pass some of the complexities of the historical context of the debates over the value of the vernacular, Papio offers a solid introduction that follows in the footsteps of many years of literary history on the subject. The lasting contribution of the volume lies in the accuracy of the translation and in the expansiveness of the notes. It would be a good acquisition for university and departmental libraries as a reference text and for scholars of medieval literary theory. Unfortunately, the volume's steep cost ($135) might prohibit its use in the classroom, unless it is soon released in an economy edition.
Notes:
1. Giorgio Padoan, ed., Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, vol. 6, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Milan: Mondadori, 1965).
2. See, for example, David Wallace, The Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 261-307; James Kriesel, "The Genealogy of Boccaccio's Theory of Allegory," Studi sul Boccaccio 37 (2009): 197-226; David Wallace, "Griselde before Chaucer: Love between Men, Women, and Farewell Art," in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. Andrew Galloway and Robert F. Yeager (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 206-20; Jason M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 64-73, 93-98, 124-56.