Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron

THE DECAMERON

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO was born in 1313, either in Florence or Certaldo, a town in Florentine territory. His father, a prosperous merchant banker with the Compagnia dei Bardi, moved to Naples in 1327 as general manager of the banks Neapolitan branch, taking the adolescent Boccaccio with him. He entertained notions of his son following in his footsteps, and apprenticed him to the trade, but when he realized that Boccaccio had no vocation for banking he arranged for him to study canon law. This was equally unsuccessful, and after a few years Boccaccio gave up his legal studies and devoted his time to literature and scholarship. At this period Naples, under King Robert of Anjou, was one of the major intellectual and cultural centres in Europe. To judge from references in his Latin epistles, Boccaccio considered his sojourn in Naples as the happiest period in his life. For political and economic reasons he was forced to return to Florence in 1341. His experiences during what is now known as the Black Death (13479) are recorded in the introduction to the Decamerons First Day, and when he met Petrarch in 1350 he had probably begun work on his great narrative masterpiece. He had already gained a reputation in Florence as an eloquent and persuasive man of letters, and the government entrusted him with several official missions. In 1354 and 1365 he was sent to the Papal Court at Avignon, and in 1367 to Rome in order to congratulate Urban V on the temporary return of the papacy from its so-called Babylonian Captivity. He revisited Naples three times, in 1355, 1362 and 1370. He had moved to Certaldo after the second of these visits and spent most of the last thirteen years of his life there, dying in 1375, just over a year after Petrarch. Boccaccio wrote several other works, including the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, which has been described as the first modern psychological novel, and the narrative poem Filostrato, on which Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde is based.

G. H. MCWILLIAM, a former Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, was Professor Emeritus of Italian in the University of Leicester. His publications include studies of Dante, Boccaccio, Verga, Pirandello, Ugo Betti, Italian literature in Ireland, Shakespeares Italy, and the pronunciation of Italian in the sixteenth century. He translated plays by Italo Svevo, Pirandello and Betti, and poems by Salvatore Quasimodo. His translation of Vergas Cavalleriarusticana and Other Stories was published by Penguin Classics in 1999. He held the Italian Governments silver medal for services to Italian culture. He died in January 2001.

Giovanni Boccaccio

TRANSLATED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
G. H. MCWILLIAM

Second Edition

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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This translation first published 1972

Second edition, with new introduction, bibliography, maps and notes, published 1995

Reprinted 2003

Copyright G. H. McWilliam, 1972, 1995 All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101487525

To Vittore Branca
Primus studiorum dux

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First published in 1972, the present translation of the Decameron has been several times reprinted since that date, with occasional emendations of a distinctly minor complexion. Meanwhile, two further complete English translations of Boccaccios master work have appeared, the first by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa in 1982, the second by Guido Waldman in 1993. My translation for Penguin Classics was compared with the BondanellaMusa version some years ago by the American scholar Christopher Kleinhenz, who concluded that both furnish texts that are remarkably close to Boccaccios original in meaning, tone, and nuance and that moreover, they provide most enjoyable reading, and that is, after all, one of the principal reasons why Boccaccio wrote the Decameron.

Naturally, I would not wish to dissent from either of those conclusions, but for some little time I have felt that something was lacking in the Penguin Decameron. The translation itself still seems in my not altogether impartial judgement to read surprisingly well, and a hand more dextrous than my own would be required to improve it to any significant degree. I have however taken this opportunity to make certain minor changes, one of them being the proverb that concludes the story of Alatiel (II, 7), where a slightly stilted and prosaic wording is replaced by something that is closer in spirit and cadence to Boccaccios original.

If the translation requires only marginal adjustment, my introduction to the first edition is now overdue for substantial revision. It provided the reader with a minimum of information about Boccaccios life and work, or about the reasons why the Decameron occupies so important a place in the history of western literature. Its original justification lay in its provision of a brief history of earlier attempts to translate the Decameron into English, highlighting their virtues and deficiencies, and hence showing why yet another translation was required. One or two of its more interesting points are preserved in the new introduction and in the notes to this second edition, but the main emphasis is now switched so as to focus in

For the monoglot, non-specialist English reader, as indeed for many students of Italian, the range of information available about Boccaccio and the Decameron is remarkably limited. The over-literal and often inaccurate American translation of Vittore Brancas Profilo biografico and sections of his Boccaccio medievale, flamboyandy entitled Giovanni Boccaccio: The Man and His Works