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speakers of both French and Italian who, he tells us, declared,
 qu elles estoient sinon bien, au moins fidelement traduictes (�2v)
[they were, if not well, at least faithfully translated], echoing the con-
cern for accuracy already noted in the privilege. Le Ma�on writes that
when the task was first proposed, he questioned whether the French
language was a tool that was equal to it. He reminds Marguerite:
 j avoye ouy dire � plusieurs de sa nation [i.e. Italians], qu ilz ne
pouvoient penser ne croire, qu il fust possible qu on le sceust bien tra-
duire en Francoys, ne dire tout ce qu il avoit dit (�2r). [I had heard
many of his countrymen say that they could neither think nor believe
that it was possible to translate it well into French, or to say all that he
had said.] Italians did in fact frequently declare France a backward
and barbarous nation. But now, the reader is to understand, such accu-
sations are properly a thing of the past. French has made progress:  en
ce temps l� trop plus que � ceste heure l opinion estoit, que nostre
langue ne fust si riche de termes et vocables comme la leur. [In those
days, more than at present, it was commonly held that our language
was not as rich in terms and words as theirs.] We have no way of
knowing how much earlier  ce temps l� was, when the project was
first discussed. Perhaps it was stimulated by what was to be the last
         
13
Dedication to Marguerite de Navarre.  S il vous souvient, ma dame, du temps
que vous feiste sejour de quatre ou cinq moys � Paris, durant lequel vous me com-
mandastes, me voyant venu nouvellement de Florence, ou j avoye sejourn� ung an
entier, vous faire lecture d aucunes nouvelles du Decameron de Bocace. Apres
laquelle il vous pleut me commender de traduire tout le livre en nostre langue
Francoyse, m assurant qu il seroit trouv� beau et plaisant (�2r). [If you recall, my
lady, the time when you were in Paris for four or five months during which you
ordered that I, newly returned from Florence where I had spent a whole year, should
read you certain stories from Boccaccio s Decameron. After which it pleased you to
order me to translate the whole book into our French language, assuring me that it
would be found fine and pleasing.]
Annie Parent-Charon suggests that one of the purposes of a dedication was to
place the text in a cultural milieu, in this case, in the highest quarters. Reading at the
court was a way of reaching a large and influential audience; she estimates the core
court in the reign of Henri II at over a thousand people, easily swelling to 6,000-
8,000. It would have been only slightly smaller in his father s reign (129, 125).
28 FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009
reprinting of the old Laurent de Premierfait translation a few years
earlier, in 1541. Marguerite s thinking about her own collection of
nouvelles, the Heptameron, whose first tales were written at about the
same time, would have added to the urgency of having access to a
more modern translation of the Italian master s work.14 Le Ma�on s
statement depends on readers having some degree of consciousness
of a changing language, of changes taking place over a fairly short
time, probably less than a decade.
Evidence of this remains in other translations of the period,
mostly of the Ancients, which not infrequently included glossaries of
terms coined by the translator, who felt obligated by his task to pro-
vide meaningful equivalents for ancient terms.15 During the last
decade of the reign of Fran�ois I, the lexicon of the French language
expanded rapidly, incorporating more abstract and collective nouns,
supporting the nascent independence of French as a language of ab-
stract thought. Included were innocent words like plante, l�gume, both
         
14
Marguerite de Navarre (33). The connection between Boccaccio and Mar-
guerite is strengthened by the title now associated with the Queen s unfinished
collection of tales; sixteenth-century manuscripts refer to it as Histoires des Amants
fortun�s et infortun�s de la Reine de Navarre (under which title it was first published
in 1558) or Les Nouvelles de la Royne de Navarre. It was first called Heptameron in
Claude Gruget s 1559 edition. Salminen, based on her painstaking work with all
extant manuscripts and other contemporary material, suggests that Marguerite began
work seriously in 1542. The earliest (incomplete) manuscripts are datable to 1545-47.
Salminen places the decision to produce a collection of a hundred tales divided into
ten days (in effect the decision to follow Boccaccio s model) to the period spent in
Cauterets from September 1546 to March 1547 (35). See Michel Fran�ois s edition
( Introduction vi).
Barbara Stephenson, on the evidence of a letter from Marguerite to Chancelier [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]