Date/Time
Date(s) - 26 Jan 2016
5:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
On Tuesday, January 26 at 5:30pm in Columbia University’s Faculty House, Professor Simone Marchesi (Princeton University) will give a talk on “The Tower and the Garden: Tropes of Translation in Medieval Vernacular Fictions” for the Seminar in Medieval Studies.
Professor Marchesi’s abstract is below:
“The garden scene is a commonplace of medieval vernacular fictions. Heavily influenced by the model of the Biblical Eden, literary gardens are a charged topos. For instance, the action in the Roman de la Rose is staged for almost its entirety in such a fantastic setting; so is the section of Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the protagonist is admitted into the earthly paradise; three full days of story-telling in Boccaccio’s Decameron are located in a carefully described garden. Similarly topical in the three texts that contain such singularly extended treatments of the garden-motif is the keen attention they devote to situating themselves in a tradition, of constructing their value as modern vernacular counterparts to classical Latin models. It is a connection that is formulated both in terms of the matter they treat and the language they use to do so.
This coincidence of topos and topic is perhaps not coincidental, but rather the effect of a diffuse understanding of Eden as related to the act of translation –a trope that has its origins in Patristic literature and is reactivated between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries by vernacular writers. In the way they are constructed and narrated, the fictional gardens of these vernacular texts offer themselves as a central space for radically optimistic acts of literary translation and cultural negotiation. They help us see that the pervasive anxiety of loss that is associated with translation in modern discourse is an alien concern to writers who have a strong belief in the hermeneutical gain that the present offers to canonical texts.”
For more information, and for the complete schedule of the Seminar in Medieval Studies meetings, please visit http://universityseminars.columbia.edu/seminars/medieval-studies/ and/or contact the Seminar’s rapporteur, Jeffrey Wayno, at [email protected].