Boccaccio's Expositions on Dante's Comedy (review)

In August of 1373, Giovanni Boccaccio received a commission from the Priors of the Guilds and the Stander-Bearer of Justice to give a year of public lectures on Dante's Commedia. He was paid the first installment of his salary 18 October, a Tuesday, and the lectures began the following Sunday, 23 October, in the church of Santo Stefano in Badia, then — it seems — a bit of a dump ("inordinata et neglecta"). The virtually daily lectures and readings were suspended early in 1374 due to Boccaccio's illness and quite possibly the chilling social effects of another plague in mid-year. As far as we know, Boccaccio never returned to continue the lectures and died the next year in December. Suspended in the midst of his discussion of the monstrous image of fraud, Geryon ("la fiera con la coda aguça" [in Boccaccio's own hand in MS Toledo, Archivo y Biblioteca Capitulares, Zelada 104.6, c. 84r]) and the "drappi tartareschi" (v. 17) at the beginning of Inferno 17. And while we have two copies of Dante's Commedia in Boccaccio's hand, the unfinished draft of Boccaccio's Expositions, left in "24 fascicles and 14 smaller gatherings" and by legal accounts in the possession of his brother Giacomo, is now lost to us. Even early copies, for example MS Riccardiano 1053 with its tantalizingly early watermarks (1380-1390), document a text of extraordinary erudition, the work is — like Dante's Convivio — unfinished and unrevised, concluding: "Sono i Tartari . . ." (PADOAN 1994, 709). Nevertheless, other Dante commentators, such as Francesco da Buti (who worked on his commentary from 1385 until his death in 1406) and Filippo Villani (who himself held the Florentine commission as public reader of the Commedia 1391-1402), seized upon its importance almost immediately. Even unfinished, Boccaccio's Expositions are a summa of his long years of literary criticism and editorial experience, drawing together his earliest studies of Dante's biography and letters in MS Laurenziano Pluteo 29.8 to his later work on classical sources and allegory in the Genealogia deorum gentilium.

Michael Papio's translation, commentary, and notes are worthy of the task of conveying and continuing that literary heritage to new generations of readers. Papio's work is a landmark in scholarship that will endure for a very long time. Building on the fine Mondadori edition edited by Giorgio Padoan ([1965] 1994), now sadly long out-of-print, Papio offers an honest but profoundly readable translation of Boccaccio's often complex, unrevised, and startlingly resourceful prose. This is no mean task but rather the work of an equally cautious crafter of language capable of bringing us to a whole new admiration for scholarly translation. It is not always easy to match Boccaccio's swings between interpretation and personal philological experience. Deep in his discussion of Inferno 8, Boccaccio has just reached back to his own experience of copying in the early 1340s a poor Friar Ilaro's letter on a visit by Dante to the Lunigiana with an early copy of his Comedy under his arm in order to clarify the origins of the work's composition and is about the business of commenting on the story of the discovery in Florence of a pre-1302 autograph copy of the first seven canti of the Inferno when he recounts the stories of his personal acquaintances Andrea di Leone Poggi, Dante's nephew, and Dino Perini, a friend of the poet's. It is here where we hear the shift in tone that must have marked Boccaccio's lectures as such a searching exercise as he admits a doubt and works through the historical markers of the question of this early witness of the first seven canti:

I do not know which of these two is more believable, but, whether either of them is telling the truth or not, their stories raise a...