Vernacular Edens

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Vernacular Edens is written by Simone Marchesi and published by University of Toronto Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1487558325 (ISBN 10) and 9781487558321 (ISBN 13).

Late-medieval European vernacular literature defined itself as the redeployment of classical and post-classical antecedents in new cultural coordinates. Many authors of narrative and poetic fiction between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries resisted the idea that moving a text from one language to another produces a loss of meaning, or, as today’s idiom goes, that something always gets “lost in translation.” Rather, they understood the process of vernacular translation as a regenerative cultural practice and often associated it with depictions of luscious and paradisal gardens in their works. Vernacular Edens presents a systematic study of a literary commonplace, the representation of gardens in medieval fictions, as a lens to understand the theories and practices of translation from Latin to the vernaculars. The book argues that the prominent narrative space that works composed in Old French, Italian, and Middle English give to garden-visit scenes is connected to their vindication of translation as an always-enriching practice. A wide range of texts from Marie de France’s Lais to the Roman de la Rose, from Dante’s Comedy to Boccaccio’s Decameron, and from Petrarch’s Griselda to Chaucer’s Clerk’s and Merchant’s Tales provide the body of evidence analysed in the book.