Broadway translations

Il Novellino: The hundred old tales

One day about the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth, when the Middle Ages still darkly curtained the Renaissance from view, a man of the Court, or minstrel, of some Italian lord had one of those inventive flashes which go to the making of literatures. This man of the Court who was perhaps a minstrel or giullare in little more than namefor his talent would be especially literaryknew by heart the little archaic tales which make up the slender corpus of the Cento Novelle Antiche, or Novellino. Often he told them or heard them told in baronial halls, and in lordly places, in rough huts after days of hunting, and in the encampments of battlefields. Before audiences of seigneurs and knights, in the company of stately prelates, and in the rollicking gatherings of dashing young donzelli, he had narrated or heard narrated by humbler men of his craft these simple [2]stories, some of them redolent of the wisdom of ages, others piquant with the flavour of his own times. Well he knew their effect, and could choose one to suit his company and occasion. Thus for the entertainment of graver and elderly lords he would select those of monkish or ascetic origin, while when in the company of gay young cavalieri, he would not hesitate to tell over some of the more libertine tales of his oral anthology. And the beginnings of the new Italian tongue, liberating itself from the secular thrall of its parent Latin, and having taken shape in its Tuscan and Sicilian matrixes, sought an early literary expression and found it in the work of our perhaps slightly pedantic giullare who will in all probability remain for ever unknown to us. That some such person existed is obvious, even if we cannot discover his name, nor his place of birth, nor estate. He may indeed have been a worldly type of monk rather than a man of the court, but the choice of the novelle, included in the collection, would certainly seem rather to point to the compiler being a man of the world rather than an ascetic. As does the fact that the tales [3]were not written in Latin, for the tenacious Latin clung to the cloisters after it had died on the tongues and pens of the lay world of those times. Our anthologist, who was in fact a great deal more than an anthologist, had coadjutors and rivals, successors and improvers, as the different manuscripts of the Novellino prove, but the original compiler of the Cento Novelle Antiche, as the work was previously called, was, one likes to believe, a single individual rather than a group of giullari or ex-giullari at the dependence of some medieval Medici. So the idea came to him of grouping together in one manuscript, which maybe he gave for copying to some Florentine monk, a selection of the knightly, moral, Biblical, classical, and popular tales which were most in vogue in his epoch. They were stories which had stood the test of timesome of them the test of successive civilizationsand had met the full-throated approval of numerous courts from Provence to Sicily, from Parma to Rome. Hitherto they had lived only on the lips of the Court story-tellers and wandering minstrels who narrated them. The tales which make up the Novellino [4]were, for the most part, taught, as we learn from our text by one giullare or story-teller to another. And each man added or altered them according to his wit and company. That the professional story-tellers played tricks with the tales in vogue and added details and colour of their own on occasion, we may well presume from Novella LXXXIX, where a man of the Court is reminded that he is spinning out his story at too great a length by one of the yawning company. The collection here printed under the title of Il Novellino, most of which tales appear in the original edition of the Cento Novelle Antiche, by Gualteruzzi, formed part of a vast repertory of similar stories, legends and anecdotes which were bandied about from province to province, from country even to country, and closed full lived medieval days of hunting and of battle. Perhaps it was after some especially successful night when our unknown compiler had won the approval of a generous signore for his tales, and carried off a purse filled with a few gold coins to his lonely room, that the idea came to him of [5]framing the oral stories in a literary form. He had probably no notion that he was making literature, or founding one of the purest early classics of the young Italian tongue which the wit of the people had shaped out of the mother Latin. For him it was a matter of convenience and utility, though the urge to give a literary shape to the spreading idiom was in the air, deriving as an impellent necessity from the propagation of the spoken word which was widespread in Tuscany and vigorous elsewhere though in dialect forms. The first literary stirrings of the Italian conscience were in the air, and writers brought up on Latin chronicles and used to the mixed French and Italian of works like the Entre en Espagne of Nicola da Padua were anxious to try their hands on the wonderful virgin material within their reach. We may reflect in passing what a marvellous opportunity it was for poets and story-tellers, although they did not recognize it as suchto find themselves in the privileged position of having a virgin language at their command, not debased by the ready-made phrase, the trite mechanical expression. With a new language coming into [6]being, nothing or almost nothing is conventionalized. The idea runs straight from the dynamic thought to the natural phrase. There are no ready-made channels to absorb the spontaneity, convenient and inevitable as such moulds afterwards become. So our man of the Court dreamed upon his great idea, developed it, thought it over, took counsel maybe of some tale-loving signore and set to work. We may, I think, fairly argue that it was some professional teller of tales, some giullare of more than average education rather than any monk or ascetic who wrote the first manuscript of the Hundred Old Tales, and this for the extremely free, not to say bawdy character of three or four of them. (These latter have not been translated.) Moreover, the curious and often ridiculous errors in geography, history, chronology and physics which we find in the Novellino is surely proof that the person who compiled it was no great scholar or man of learning. The mistakes which appear in it could hardly have been perpetrated by a learned monk well read in history and the classics. Again, Latin was still [7]the language of science and such scholarship as existed then. The times were rude in a certain sense, though perhaps less rude than is generally imagined, but some of the errors to be found in the tales are so gross and absurd that they could not have been committed to a manuscript by anyone of real learning. Which gives us ground for believing that the original anthologist was of the minstrel class, a giullare of degree and some education, with literary yearnings, stimulated perhaps by the exercises of his French and Provenal colleagues in the arts of story-telling and song. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 68831
Author: Storer, Edward
Release Date: Aug 24, 2022
Format: eBook
Language: English
Publication Date: 1925
Publisher Country: United Kingdom

Contributors

Translator: Storer, Edward, 1880-1944