O proemio da Genealogia Deorum Gentilium de Giovanni Boccaccio

Abstract

Around 1350, probably after the conclusion of the first redaction of the Decameron , Boccaccio received the commission by Ugo of Sanseverino, king of Jerusalem and Cyprus, to compose a work of great effort: the Genealogia deorum gentilium . This work includes 15 books, and in the last two we find the famous defense of poetry. From this two books, we are developing a project in a postdoctoral research to analyze the poetic ideas of Boccaccio. One of the points of the project concerns the translation of these books, and we thought it would be convenient to add the preface of the work, since it is the general introduction of the text, as required by the rhetoric composition of treatises. Considering that it is a unpublished text in Portuguese, we propose the translation of the forty paragraphs of the preface of this enormous work, so that the Brazilian public can read some Latin passages of Boccaccio.