Neapolitan Translations: Boccaccio's "Andreuccio da Perugia" (Decameron II.5)

At the dawn of the fourteenth century, the French language and its regional variants had been an established literary idiom for some three hundred years, whereas the youthful Italian vernacular literature, still more of a localized phenomenon, truly came into its own as a broader cultural movement only in the trecento (with its "tre corone" of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio). As Kevin Brownlee argues in "The Conflicted Genealogy of Cultural Authority," "The fact of French hegemony [was] a cultural given in early fourteenth-century Italian literary contexts" (286): in order to establish their own national literary tradition, Italian vernacular writers necessarily responded to the French language's status as a dominant literary idiom. This often contentious process of differentiation is characterized by Brownlee as "genealogical/generational conflict" (262). One such conflict of "native" and "foreign," of French and Italian, is staged in the fifteenth novella of Boccaccio's Decameron, a tale that constitutes not only a masterpiece of slapstick, but an undermining—through translational transactions—of French cultural authority.

The Decameron is a collection of one hundred novellas situated within a frame narrative: a brigata of ten young people, having escaped from plague-stricken Florence to a safe haven in the countryside, passes the time by telling stories. Most days are governed by a theme to which all stories must adhere: for instance, on the second day, during which the tale of Andreuccio da Perugia is narrated, each narrator tells a story constructed around a series of misadventures that nonetheless ends happily.

The story of Andreuccio da Perugia, termed by Benedetto Croce the "most Neapolitan" of Boccaccio's tales (66), is perfectly suited to the second day's theme: Andreuccio di Pietro travels from Perugia to Naples with five hundred gold florins to buy a horse, but instead he is swindled out of his money by a prostitute pretending to be his long-lost sister, dumped in a latrine, dipped into a well, and shut into a tomb, where he steals a ring whose value compensates for his lost money. It is essentially a story of foreigners and outsiders (Andreuccio, the prostitute Fiordaliso, and the thieves) in a succession of increasingly enclosed spaces: the horse market, the house, the latrine, the well, and finally, the tomb. For a story so concerned with space and its limitations—as the narrator Fiammetta emphasizes, it takes place "nello spazio d'una sola notte" ("in the space of a single night," italics mine; 99)¹—the Andreuccio novella is characterized by a remarkable lack of spatial precision. Or, as Luciano Rossi has stated, despite the abundance of historical and toponymic details, Naples appears less as a real site and more as an emblematic narrative locus ("I tre 'gravi accidenti'" 387). However, in the dark underworld of Naples—a city that becomes, as Giuseppe Mazzotta eloquently states, "a ghostly labyrinth from which there seems to be no exit" (128)—the one space that serves most effectively as a "real site" by situating the story in a specific place on a precise date is the final enclosure, the archbishop's tomb. In the course of the narration we learn that "That day an archbishop of Naples, named Filippo Minutolo, was buried" (109). The tomb thus provides the novella's most precise temporospatial anchoring point (Figure 1).²

The tomb also encapsulates the strategies whereby Boccaccio, his protagonist (Andreuccio), and his setting (Naples) all break free of French cultural dominance. For if Boccaccio's narrative (or indeed any work from the earliest periods of Italian vernacular literature) is to become a culturally dominant text in its own right, this cultural independence can be achieved primarily through varied processes of translation. Trecento authors employ strategies of translation in the most obvious senses of the word, foremost among which is the transfer of a text from one language to another: such a strategy is employed in "Andreuccio da Perugia," which is, as Luciano Rossi ("L'evoluzione dell'intreccio") and Marilyn Migiel have noted, a partial rewriting and expansion of the French fabliau "Boivin de Provins." Indeed, the first part of the Boccaccian novella closely...