The Decameron

When I was looking for a new translation of the Decameron to read, I read a quote by G. H. McWilliam, describing this translation as a "magnificent specimen of Jacobean prose." He went on to describe its serious shortcomings, but I ignored this. I love the Decameron and I love Jacobean prose. As I hoped, I found this cheap e-book edition on Amazon and was able to enjoy it despite minor print-to-electronic text shortcomings.

I loved the book and the translation. This book is famous for shocking people and I was surprised that I was shocked by two of the stories. I was not shocked by the bawdy stories. I loved them and wished Florio had not flinched at some of the details. I was upset by two of the serious stories purporting to provide show more morals for the reader: one, suggested a good beating as a cure for shrewishness in a wife; the other, the famous story of patient Griselda, in which a wife is praised for her willingness to accept an enormous amount of abuse from her husband. show less

When the plague hits Florence in 1348, 7 women and 3 men decide to escape the city and retire to the countryside -- and once there they tell each other stories. 10 days, most of them with a specific topic, each of the 10 youths tell a story of love, hate and whatever else they can think of. But the book is not just the stories - there is also a framing story around them, complete with the reactions of the people who are not telling the story, with songs, with details about the countryside and there is Boccaccio - defending his own work and adding an extra story to Day 4 (incomplete around to him; actually complete if you compare it to the rest of the stories).

Very few of the stories are original ones - some had been moved in time or show more space, some had been mixed together but they are mostly preexisting stories from the existing literature at the time - in Latin, French and Italian; some of it translated into the language from more exotic languages (including Arabic tales). How familiar that had been for the people reading the book in the Middle Ages is unclear; these days one is a lot more likely to have heard one of the books and stories which had used Boccaccio's tales as their base - from Chaucer through Shakespeare and to the authors of today, everyone had been borrowing parts of stories (and occasionally complete ones) and made them their own.

But despite that, the collection is worth reading. Not all stories worked for me (but then this would be impossible considering the number of stories). There were some disturbing elements (women being punished for not accepting the love of a man; both men and women managing to get in bed with someone by misrepresenting themselves and still getting a happy end; making jokes of what is essentially the village idiot), there were heartbreaking stories and there is human cunning and cruelty. The attacks on the church and its representatives was not exactly unexpected but still a lot more pronounced than I expected.

As the days progressed, the stories got occasionally repetitive -- especially when the topic was too concrete, it felt like the same story wa told over and over again. It helped to let the stories breathe a bit. The irregular lengths did not help much with planning either.

The translator G. H. McWilliam added a lot of geographical, historical and linguistical notes (combined with notes on the sources for each story) which are not essential but put the stories in context (and can be amusing at times - especially when he comments on earlier editions and translators). His introduction is also extremely informative although as usual, it really should not be read as an introduction unless you want the few surprising stories to get spoiled for you.

At the end I liked the book quite a lot. But one needs to be prepared for it - it is a 14th century book after all - as progressive it might have been, it is still almost 7 centuries old at this point. So there is the occasional story which is sexist enough to make you want to grind your teeth, there are the not so occasional notes and hints towards the fragility of women (although there are also some strong women), there are the behaviors which are creepy and borderline criminal and yet considered normal in the book. But then that is part of the charm in reading old literature - the world had changed and these books are the only mirror we have into the past. And then, especially with books which had been as popular as this one for centuries, it is always fun to recognize a plot you had read elsewhere (and that's where the notes on the sources also helped - showing how the stories traveled from book to book and from writer to writer and culture to culture). show less

I have spent the last fortnight reading through this 1903 translation of Boccaccio's Decameron, one of the classic works of Medieval European literature. The Decameron is a similar idea to the contemporaneous Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. In the Italian version, 10 young people (7 women, 3 men) from Florence escape from the Black Death which is ravaging the city (and the rest of Europe of course) in the mid 14th century. They settle in a happily deserted but richly appointed villa outside the city and over the course of a fortnight each of the 10 tells one story a day to their fellow escapees (they break for Friday and Saturday twice, hence 10 days of stories). For each day one or other of the 10 is the king or queen of the party and show more sets the theme for the day's 10 stories, such as tales of women deceiving men, or vice versa, reversals of fortune, etc. The tales are mostly very short, though given the large number of them, the book weighs in at over 1000 pages. Many of the tales are very salacious, and quite sexually explicit by pre-modern standards, with both men and women enthusiastically engaging in copulation (though there is a lot of what we would call rape as well). Boccaccio has a grudge against members of the clergy and religious in general who are frequently the butt of jokes and the committers of sexual peccadilloes in the stories. The tales can also be quite repetitive though and there were a few I found rather dull and unclear. But the format means that this is a gem of a collection that can be absorbed in small doses more easily than reading a thousand page novel. The author concludes with an epilogue defending in fairly modern terms his stories against critics who would say they are unsuitable or harmful. The 1903 translation was slightly old fashioned but largely easily comprehensible (the Delphi Collected Works of Boccaccio also contain two other copyright-free translations from 1620 [the first attempt at a nominally complete English translation] and 1886 [the first genuinely complete English translation]). A gem of stories and some day I will rea da more modern translation. show less

Summary: A classic collection of one hundred stories told for amusement over ten days by seven women and three men escaping the plague of 1348 in Florence.

A hundred year old copy of Decameron resides in the depths of my bookcases. I don't suspect it was ever read, with pages still uncut but my mom spoke of these stories as if she knew them. I never picked them up until this spring, when a reading group I'm a part of decided to read this. The first challenge was to chose an edition. We looked at the classic (and free via e-book) translation by John Payne. It read formal and dense, and we decided we would never survive a book of this length without finding a more readable translation. Wayne A. Rebhorn's recent translation more than fits show more the bill. It is lively, vernacular, and brings out the humor and earthiness of Boccaccio's tale, combining readability and nobility without ever becoming stuffy.

"Decameron" means "ten days," which alludes to the framing story for these one hundred stories. It is 1348 and the plague has struck Florence. Seven women and three men fleeing the city meet up and decide to travel together and take up lodgings in the course of the stories at several idyllic country estates with separate bedrooms (!) and verdant gardens and servants to supply their needs. For amusement, they agree to meet together each day for ten days (with breaks extending the ten days of storytelling over fifteen days abroad) and each tell a story for the others. One of their number presides as king or queen each day, both arranging meals and most importantly, setting a theme for the stories each day for the group--for all that is but Dioneo. Dioneo claims special privilege to tell the concluding story and choose his own theme. Two of the days are storyteller's choice. Other themes include misfortunes turned to happiness, resourcefulness in action or wit, loves that end unhappily or happily, tricks played by women on husbands, on men in general, men on women, and men on men. The collection concludes on a high note with stories of those who act with magnificence in love or otherwise.

How does one summarize these stories? They are earthy, and often the women are as lusty as the men, and affairs seem to be accepted and generally inconsequential unless one is caught, and even then, the test is whether one may escape by one's wits. The lack of the sad consequences that follow such affairs in real life seemed somewhat disconcerting, and an indulgence in unreality--some of us thought of it as a male fantasy world. Some stories are fairly crude, as is the case where a friend is called to cast a spell to turn a man's wife into a mare, and for the spell to work, the friend must pin his "tale" on the mare.

The church hardly escapes this earthiness as bishops, priests, and nuns (in one case a whole abbey) succumb to sins of the flesh. One of the most telling commentaries is the second story in the collection in which a Jew goes to Rome and on return converts because, given the low estate of the church that he saw, it can only survive because there is a God (sadly true at several times and places in our history!).

Sometimes they are downright hilarious, particularly the tales of Buffo and Buffalmacco and their witless friend Calendrino, who they dupe in several stories. One wonders how he can be so stupid to let these guys deceive him, and why he retains them as friends.

While earthy, they retain a certain focus on style. Day Six's stories where a witty response or quick retort saves the day or puts one in their place is an example. One example is an uncle who suggests to his vain niece that she not preen in the mirror if it is true that she does not like looking at disagreeable people! We thought that this kind of wit, of which Ronald Reagan was the epitome, is desperately needed in our public life.

Style extends to nobility of spirit and action. Perhaps my favorite story in the volume was that of Torello and Saladhin. Torello extends generous hospitality to Saladhin, traveling incognito. Later when captured by Saladhin in a Crusade, the tables are turned in a marvelous way that transcended these wasteful conflicts.

Not all is noble, however and there is a dark undercurrent running through these stories of how men exercise power over women, sometimes with great physical and psychological cruelty (one husband tests his wife's loyalty by seeming to kill her children, and then send her off to her father, feigning to marry another). Yet often women find way to give as good as they get. One wife, caught in an affair and dragged before the judge, exposes her husband's "inattentiveness" and gets the law changed through her witty defense. Women trick their husbands, often without the husbands knowing they have been tricked.

In the epilogue, Boccaccio gives a defense for the bawdy or unseemly character of some of his stories. He argues both that when these are written with elegance, and read by people of character, they do no harm but simply amuse or delight. And it seems that this is indeed the case for the young women and men who tell and listen to these stories. It might be argued that the survival of these stories to our own day suggests the power of Boccaccio as a story teller. Boccaccio reveals humanity in our pretensions to greatness, and the realities of our desires, our blindness and folly, sparks of wit and the thrill of romance, unseemly greed, and noble generosity. We still like stories that explore all these things and perhaps the genius of Boccaccio was to combine them through a compelling framing story into a single volume. show less

Amazing.

I'm utterly flabbergasted by how good this is. Forty years before The Canterbury Tales took England by storm, a little tiny place called Italy was having a full-blown RENAISSANCE. So why the hell have I been avoiding all these fantastic pieces of art, anyway? Because they're in Italian? For SHAME.

Fortunately, this translation is fantastic... and you know what? It really holds up. It has everything a public who wants to be entertained could ever desire. A hundred short stories framed by nobles hiding out while the Black Plague ravages Europe, eating, frolicking, and telling stories every night for ten nights.

Do you think a quarantine is a recipe for depression and disaster? Muahahahahaha NO. Let's just put it this way... show more there's more sex, laughter, trickery, sex, adultery, sex, theft, cons, sex, and hilarious situations in these stories than you'd find in the entire works of Shakespeare. And let's put this in perspective... Chaucer and Shakespeare stole a TON of s**t from Boccaccio. All of it funny and light and clever and wickedly perverse.

I always knew that literature, in general, is an incestuous lot, but between these many classic tales of spouses pulling fast ones on each other or selfless tales of true love or steadfastness or tales of corruption, greed, and confidence games, I'm tempted to just throw in the hat and say this guy has it ALL.

I know it ain't true. I've read enough Italians from more than a millennia prior to put paid to that idea. But STILL. This is entertaining as hell. And I thought Chaucer was a RIOT, too.

It just goes to show... never judge a book by its cover. You might be losing out on some GREAT comedy. show less

It gets off to what I thought of as 'a slow start' (even though that's not quite the correct phrase) in that the initial stories are short unto insubstantial, but this soon gives way to more substantial (and fun) narratives.

Truly, a fountain of delight. I would recommend skipping the introduction and diving right in -- then, when you feel like it, read the introduction because it is substantial and has a great deal of useful stuff in it. My fear re: reading the introduction first is that the typical reader risks being bored by it.

G. H. McWilliam's translation reads superbly. I don't have the expertise to comment on its accuracy/fidelity to the Italian original.

UPDATE: finished! The only shadow to the enjoyment of this book and its show more cornucopia of tales is the (expected, I guess) not-infrequent treatment of women as property, sub-humans, whatever. I don't want to go on about this, but if there is -- in toto -- a better encapsulation of the divide between misogyny-with-woman-as-whore and misogyny-with-woman-as-saint, I haven't read it. Boccaccio flutters easily between the two. I could wish, for example, that the very last story had NOT been the story of "patient Griselda," familiar also from Chaucer (I think) because it is impossible for me to read that story and not wonder why Griselda didn't throttle the bastard.

Still, to trot out an old saw, one has to remember when this was written. show less

12. The Decameron (Penguin Classics) by Giovanni Boccaccio
translated by G. H. McWilliam
written: ~1353, translation 1972, revised 1995
format: 909-page paperback
acquired: January 3
read: Jan 4 – Mar 23
time reading: 46:25, 2.8 mpp
rating: 5
locations: Florence, and lots of specific places around Italy, and some beyond.
about the author: Boccaccio: 1313-1375, Florentine author, diplomat. G. H. McWilliam was a former Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and Professor Emeritus of Italian in the University of Leicester. He passed away in 2001

That I put three months into this and took pages and pages of notes on these hundred stories is a little more overwhelming rather than helpful in trying to write up a little response.

In brief, I liked it. The show more frame story is entertaining - a group of ten young single ladies and men escape plague-overwhelmed Florence, and, in a pleasant, isolated setting, with servants, leisure and comforts, begin to tell stories. They spend ten days, each member telling one story every day. (They also take breaks on Fridays and Saturdays for religious observation and washing. So, it's a 14-day retreat.) The 100 stories begin with a long story that I found trying because I was worried about 100 stories like this. But that would be my only complaint about length until the near the end (stories 97, 98, and 99 tried me. I was ready to be done. Story 100 is terrific). Story two was quick, a little entertaining, surprisingly respectful of a non-Christian character. Story three equates the three Mediterranean religions. But, anyway, religion aside, I was mildly entertained, and then again and again. As we get into day 2, the stories start to get racy, and in entertaining ways. It clearly makes the stories better. These are bawdy tales full of comedy, cleverness, lust and sex, but they mostly stay very light. Individually mildly entertaining, but read one after another, they relax the reader's natural intensity of trying to grasp what they read; and natural worry about what's coming next. They lie easy on the reader, and I started to see them as they were maybe partially intended, as an escape. I would hang-out with Boccaccio and the rest of my day, usually ahead as I read in the morning, could be set aside. I was never enraptured, but I was in this storytelling place. It was notably non-threatening, non-tiring and non-demanding. If good writing comes across as effortless to the reader, then this gets full marks.

A lot of ideas have been put forth for the themes and trends within Boccaccio's story arch. I think, to his credit, they are at best loose fitting. Yes, ingenuity, love (or really just lust), and arbitrary Fortune (capital 'F') make the main themes. The hypocrisy of the Christian clergy and the wantonness of the women are there, repetitively, including in many rants. Values and savviness of 14th century Italian mercantile bourgeoisie - check. Code of conduct of old feudal aristocracy - check. Supremacy of natural laws over this and all codes of conduct - check. Contrasts of reality and appearances - check. And storytelling itself - a defense (partially in satire) and critique - also check. But the collection of stories has an apparent randomness to it, such that all these theories, when you think about them, undermine the fun. You're not supposed to be thinking about theory, or what Boccaccio was thinking about when he was constructing, or whatever he does with his prose, or what his morality is (since he cuts through all moralities sometimes). You're supposed to just enjoy it. I found the sexism contrast and occasional cruelty (days 7-9) a little tough to overlook. The sexism is annoying because it's framed as a book for ladies and has many indicators of feminism. They're all false leads. It's as sexist as anything I've read. And cruelty just isn't entertaining to us in this time and place. Mostly Boccaccio provoked without getting any readers upset. Of course, each reader will have their own responses, their own levels of comfort and discomfort, and the less the latter the more they will enjoy these.

In the literary trend, very briefly, Boccaccio had a lot of sources of stories to pull from, does so freely. And he has had an immense influence on literature going forward, notably on Chaucer and Shakespeare. And, like Apuleius's [Golden Ass], he lays his influence in a fun way. He's an enjoyable source. In my own head, I associate him with Ovid's [Metamorphoses], and Spencer's [Faerie Queene] in the sense of how easily he takes the reader, well some readers, into a removed mental storytelling wordy space.

So, with a hundred stories, what stands out? Well, to a large extent this is dependent on the other reading I did about the Decameron. Ultimately i read so much about story 1, that long one, that I've come to see its value in a variety of lights and it's become important to me. The others are Alatiel and her nine lovers (story 2:7), Masetto, who plays dumb in a nunnery and sleeps with all the nuns (story 3:1), the story that introduces day 4, on a child isolated by his father in a cave for moral purity, who, seeing pretty ladies for the first time (he calls them gosslings), is struck my natural lust, the story of the parents finding their daughter with a lover on a balcony, holding his "nightingale" (and noticing the touches Shakespeare picked up for his Romeo and Juliet love scene)(story 5:4), the story where the priest, father Gianni, pretends to turn his friends wife into a horse, while he watches (story 9:10), and, a pleasant surprise, the famous last story of Griselda, the common girl tormented by her deranged noble husband, who withstands it all. After all I had read about Griselda before this story, and how awful it sounds, I was surprised how charmed I was.

Only recommended to everyone.

2022
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