The Decameron
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The Decameron is a collection of stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, structured as an overarching bridge containing 100 tales of love, adventure and surprising twists of fortune which later inspired Chaucer, Keats and Shakespeare.
In the early summer of 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city of Florence, ten young Florentines take refuge in various country villas to tell each other stories—all while seeking to escape the Black Death.
In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at that time.
Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose.
While Dante is a stern moralist, Boccaccio has little patience for notions of chastity, pokes fun at hypocritical clerics, and celebrates the power of passion to overcome obstacles and social divisions.
Like the Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Decameron is a towering monument of medieval pre-Renaissance literature, and incorporates certain important elements that are not at once apparent to today's readers.
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (1313-1375) was the creator of numerous works of prose and poetry. Of his achievements, The Decameron, completed sometime between 1350 and 1352, remains his lasting contribution to world literature, enormously popular from its original appearance to the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In time for Giovanni Boccaccio's 700th birthday, Wayne A. Rebhorn, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and translator of The Prince and Other Writings by Machiavelli, has provided a strikingly modern translation of Boccaccio's medieval Italian classic. Fleeing Florence and the plague of 1348, 10 young men and women retreat to a country estate, "surrounded by meadows and marvelous gardens," where they spend their days in leisure while the Black Death ravages the city. To fill their time, and affirm life in the face of death, they tell stories: on each of 10 days, every character spins a tale on a theme. Thus, there are 100 stories in total, which range in tone from tragic to triumphant and from pious to bawdy, and which serve as monuments to the rich medieval life and society that the plague was to fundamentally alter. Rebhorn's translation is eminently readable and devoid of the stilted, antiquated speech associated with the classics. Indeed, at times the translator's rendering of Boccaccio's Italian into contemporary idiomatic American English feels jarring: "my cheesy-weesy, sweet honeybun of a wife." But on the whole, his translation's accessibility allows for the timeless humanity of the work to shine through. The Decameron affords a fascinating view into the lost world of late-medieval Italy, and the variety and volume of tales offers us a refuge and relief from the tragedies that haunt our own world.
