Book finished: The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio
24/9/2016
A collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)
This book has stood the test of time, and passed with flying colours. I thought it was about time I tackled it, and found it very rewarding. Be warned that it contains frank and frequent mentions of sexual adventures, and often satirises the behaviour of members of the Catholic clergy. It has been banned at various times and places (see Cabinet 7: The Italians), even including here in my own country, in 1939.
It is a "frame story", containing 100 stories told by ten people over ten days, hence the title, from the Greek for "ten days". A group of young aristocrats journey out of Florence to a country villa, to escape the Black Death. The seven women and three men agree to tell each other stories to pass the time. Each day, they elect someone to preside, choose the subject, and select the next storyteller. The stories cover a wide range of social classes, locations, and historical periods. They also vary in tone, with "examples of the power of fortune; examples of the power of human will; love tales that end tragically; love tales that end happily; clever replies that save the speaker; tricks that women play on men; tricks that people play on each other in general; examples of virtue" all appearing. Boccaccio borrowed almost all the tales from other sources, some centuries old, some from other cultures, but he extensively rewrote them, updating them to his own time, changing locations, including or implying actual persons, and even combining stories. The book was very influential, some borrowers from him were Chaucer, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Keats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and George Eliot. Did I say it is also very funny? |
There is humour from the very first story, where "Ser Cepparello, commonly known as Ciapelletto, a notoriously wicked man, travels on a business to Burgundy, a region he is unknown in, as a favor to Musciatto Franzesi. Once there, he soon falls terminally ill. The two Florentine brothers who were housing him during his stay bring a friar from a nearby convent to hear his confession and give him his last rites. Ciappelletto proceeds to tell the friar lies about his life that make him seem very pure, while pretending to cringe over venial sins. He is completely believed by the friar, who preaches a sermon on his life after he passes away. The townspeople who hear the sermon believe that he was a holy man and revere him as a saint long after Ciapelletto died." Here we have a ridiculing of the practices of the church. Incidentally, the story originates from 400 AD.
Despite the effort of unravelling Boccaccio's complex sentence structure (see below), I still found myself laughing as many of the stories unfolded. It was soon evident that the behaviour of people of his time was not greatly different from people of today: love, jealousy, obsession, revenge, greed, high-mindedness, spirituality etc. Usually, in accounts of this period, it is the deeds and affairs of the rich, holy and powerful that are related. However, Boccaccio gives us accounts of ordinary people's lives, and I found the little details of everyday life most interesting.
Because of the density of the text, and the short story episodes, I found this ideal reading for commuting, where interrupted reading didn't mean losing the plot, and there was no time to become tired of the reading effort.
Even though I took quite a while to read it, I found this book greatly rewarding, and a fascinating insight into the Medieval period.
For those requiring analysis, and more detail, Wikipedia has both, in the form of: -
Wikipedia main entry on The Decameron, and a
Wikipedia Summary of Decameron Tales.
A bit of searching will also find plenty of popular and literary criticism, for instance this nicely illustrated Blog with ten pages looking at each day's stories. Update 02/2023: Sadly the Blog is no more.
Despite the effort of unravelling Boccaccio's complex sentence structure (see below), I still found myself laughing as many of the stories unfolded. It was soon evident that the behaviour of people of his time was not greatly different from people of today: love, jealousy, obsession, revenge, greed, high-mindedness, spirituality etc. Usually, in accounts of this period, it is the deeds and affairs of the rich, holy and powerful that are related. However, Boccaccio gives us accounts of ordinary people's lives, and I found the little details of everyday life most interesting.
Because of the density of the text, and the short story episodes, I found this ideal reading for commuting, where interrupted reading didn't mean losing the plot, and there was no time to become tired of the reading effort.
Even though I took quite a while to read it, I found this book greatly rewarding, and a fascinating insight into the Medieval period.
For those requiring analysis, and more detail, Wikipedia has both, in the form of: -
Wikipedia main entry on The Decameron, and a
Wikipedia Summary of Decameron Tales.
A bit of searching will also find plenty of popular and literary criticism, for instance this nicely illustrated Blog with ten pages looking at each day's stories. Update 02/2023: Sadly the Blog is no more.
Readability
I had not considered there might be a modern translation when I chose to download this text. It is available free from the Project Gutenberg website, although I seem to have got it from Manybooks.net, a free book aggregation site that extensively sources from Project Gutenberg. [See Footnote for an explanation of how I know the source.]
I would be interested to see a modern translation. I expect it would be a lot more readable than this one, which can be hard going at times. Manybooks gives it a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score of 61.6, which is in the easy category, but only just: -
60.0–70.0 8th & 9th grade Plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students.
50.0–60.0 10th to 12th grade Fairly difficult to read.
The language is not "Plain English" at all. There are very long sentences, and many of those have a complex, digressive construction. There are also many archaic words used, such as "algates", "certes", "usance", "behoveth", "amain" etc. Some of these usages can be a little disconcerting, such as "whereupon the two lovers came incontinent to her succour", where "incontinent" is an adverb, and an obsolete word for "immediately".
I wondered at the style, since the original was written around 1350 in the Florentine language, and would have no direct equivalent to the style employed by translator John Payne in about 1886.
In 1972, George Henry McWilliam made the first complete translation into contemporary English, and the following Wikipedia extract quotes him on Payne's translation thusly: - "Stands and falls on its “splendidly scrupulous but curiously archaic... sonorous and self-conscious Pre-Raphaelite vocabulary” according to McWilliam, who gives as an example from tale III.x: “Certes, father mine, this same devil must be an ill thing and an enemy in very deed of God, for that it irketh hell itself, let be otherwhat, when he is put back therein.”" This passage both describes the flavour of the writing and explains why the translation sounds much more archaic than the English in use in 1886.
Another Pre Raphaelite treatment is the below painting.
I would be interested to see a modern translation. I expect it would be a lot more readable than this one, which can be hard going at times. Manybooks gives it a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score of 61.6, which is in the easy category, but only just: -
60.0–70.0 8th & 9th grade Plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students.
50.0–60.0 10th to 12th grade Fairly difficult to read.
The language is not "Plain English" at all. There are very long sentences, and many of those have a complex, digressive construction. There are also many archaic words used, such as "algates", "certes", "usance", "behoveth", "amain" etc. Some of these usages can be a little disconcerting, such as "whereupon the two lovers came incontinent to her succour", where "incontinent" is an adverb, and an obsolete word for "immediately".
I wondered at the style, since the original was written around 1350 in the Florentine language, and would have no direct equivalent to the style employed by translator John Payne in about 1886.
In 1972, George Henry McWilliam made the first complete translation into contemporary English, and the following Wikipedia extract quotes him on Payne's translation thusly: - "Stands and falls on its “splendidly scrupulous but curiously archaic... sonorous and self-conscious Pre-Raphaelite vocabulary” according to McWilliam, who gives as an example from tale III.x: “Certes, father mine, this same devil must be an ill thing and an enemy in very deed of God, for that it irketh hell itself, let be otherwhat, when he is put back therein.”" This passage both describes the flavour of the writing and explains why the translation sounds much more archaic than the English in use in 1886.
Another Pre Raphaelite treatment is the below painting.
Footnote: - Tracking down a file source
Boccaccio, Giovanni - The Decameron of.mobi
[Date Modified 19/01/2014 Date Created 12/11/2015] When I tried to find where I downloaded this file, I first searched my browser history, but alas, the file was created 19/01/2014, and the history didn't go back that far. It would have been downloaded with my old, semi-retired and completely re-installed XP machine. I got my new machine around 10/7/2014, and the "Date Created" above is when I transferred all my documents from the old to the new. Undeterred, I wondered if there might be a clue within the file itself. I fired up my trusty copy of Irfanview, a fantastic (and free!) image viewer utility program. It cannot display .mobi files, but does have a utility function called "Show HEX view". This opens the file but displays only the raw binary data as hexadecimal numbers (Left), together with a column displaying the data as if it were ASCII characters. In most files, some of the data actually is ASCII characters, and they are easily spotted within the bulk of apparently random gibberish resulting from interpreting the raw data as text. The ASCII characters can be quite revealing as to the nature of the file, so if, for instance, a file has lost the three-character filename extension, like .doc, or .jpg, and you can't identify what it is, you can inspect the ASCII data to get a clue. In the image at lower left you can see the start of a file, and the yellow highlighted "ID3" identifies the data as an IDv3 tag for an mp3 music file of "Be Mine", by Alabama Shakes. For this .mobi file, in the top image at Left, starting at address ED0 (3792 decimal) we find "Boccaccio, Giovanni", "manybooks.net", "Classic", "Fiction", "Banned Books", and a bit further down, the title. Thus we can see the source of the file. However, even further down the file, in the second image down at Left, at address 1A00 ( 6656 decimal) we find "ROJECTGUTENBERG", an indicator of Manybooks' source for the file. |