Page 160 - The Grotesque Children's Book

conversational style which was meant to be easy to read. Though, that Dante,
now, he wrote in verse which was rhymed every other line, so I don't know how
actually conversational it would have sounded, really. A poet colleague of mine
insists on rhyming all the time when we get together and, well, he's insufferable
and not a lot of fun. Though he would probably be surprised to hear me that that
about him. He thinks he's a stitch. When he drops a fancy impromptu rhyme into
the conversation like, oh, I don't know, “Silly us/so punctilious” or
“prosodian/custodian,” he's practically clawing at his phone to record it for his
writer blog. Dante might have liked him, but I don't see him much anymore. Pass
the picante, Dante.

The other guy, Boccaccio, I think is more like what the original Italian
author of The Grotesque Children's Book might have sounded like: not too afraid
of your ain'ts of c'mons or your y'knows. Y'know...casual. And probably also
funny. Or at least fun. Grandson Cardano wasn't a funny writer. You can't
really put the blame on him; there wasn't a lot of funny stuff being written in
English at the time. This would have been circa 1640-1660, when prose wasn't
very funny yet. He was writing before Pope or Swift. The most prominent literary
clown of his day would have been Pepys, who wrote about such amusing things as
the plague and the Great London Fire. Just after those laff-riots the Pilgrims,
fleeing England and landing at Plymouth Rock. Dreary, humorless literature;
bailing to a new country. Cause and effect? You decide.

Translator’s Note. About the illustrations. The pictures in this edition are
authentic. They're all painted on the ceilings at the Uffizi Gallery. You can go
there and see them for yourself. They're amazing. Grotesque, indeed. Some very
bizarre images: monsters, creatures, people turning into plants, half-men/half-
birds/half-lions (bad math, but you'll see what I mean), caryatids, telamons,
herms, sirens, harpies, tetramorphs, trophies with rams' heads and dolphins,
goats, demons, more goats, more demons. My photos of the illustrations in the
folio didn't turn out so great because of the dim light in the archives, so I've
goosed them a little in Photoshop; made them bright and colorful like the
originals must have been. The art in the ceilings is painted fresco work, like the
Sistine Chapel...same technique, but the art in the actual Grotesque Children's
Book was a combination of ink and the Renaissance equivalent of water color:
that is to say, the folio is more like a sketchbook than finished ceiling painting.
I've tried to evoke that look in my Photoshopping.

There are some places coming up in the novel where I've included some
art from the ceiling itself, which wouldn’t have been included in the original...the
presumption being, I suppose, that the original novel's readers could go to the

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