Dopo quattro mesi di ascolto (per un totale di circa quaranta ore), ho finito di ascoltare il podcast di Ad Alta Voce dedicato al Decameron di Giovanni Boccaccio. Devo dire di essermi molto divertita ad ascoltare le cento novelle lette da vari attori e attrici e di aver trovato molto interessanti le spiegazioni sul testo.

La mia paura maggiore – quella di non riuscire a seguire bene l’ascolto a causa dell’italiano del Trecento – non si è verificata. Anzi, vista la bravura di lettori e lettrici è altamente probabile che l’abbia capito con molta più facilità di quanto non mi sarebbe successo a leggermelo da sola.

Mi sono anche molto divertita a twittare le mie impressioni a mano a mano che ascoltavo le novelle e ne è venuto fuori un thread molto lungo, del quale vi lascio il primo tweet qua sotto.

Ora, cosa dire di un mostro sacro come il Decameron? Ci sono due riflessioni che vorrei fare a fine ascolto.

La prima riguarda il vento di morale laica e modernità che inizia a soffiare dalle pagine del Decameron: magari nel Trecento (e per molto tempo a venire) erano concetti percepiti come minacciosi e scandalosi, mentre oggi sono il nostro pane quotidiano. Rimango sempre ammirata dalla capacità della letteratura di mettere nero su bianco il futuro, con le speranze e i pericoli che queste porta con sé.

L’altra riflessione che mi sento di fare è molto femminista. Il Decameron si apre con la dedica alle donne, per terminare con la novella più misogina dell’intera opera: perché? L’idea che mi sono fatta – non so quanto criticamente corretta – è che lo sconvolgimento portato dalla peste si sia esteso anche ai rapporti tra i generi maschile e femminile, che quindi gode di una maggiore libertà; tuttavia, passata la malattia, l’ordine costituito deve ritornare, così si torna a schiacciare le donne sotto il giogo della misoginia più brutale. ( )

I find it hard to rate this because like 75% of it is funny stories and they're *really* funny. The translation (the Penguin Classics edition) does a really great job of conveying subtle jokes in the original. The funny stories are really clever, extremely bawdy and made me laugh out loud many times. If the book was just that I would have no hesitation in describing it as one of my favourite books ever.

The problem is that the author is a sexist - I assume about as much so as most other male medieval authors - which sometimes comes out in gross discordant ways. Most stories aren't really affected or you can play the 1 or 2 sexist comments off as tongue in cheek but a few make uncomfortable reading in that they emphasise violence against women as if in a "justified" way. So one story is a typical "fool" story where people play a prank on a man... and then at the end of the story he beats up his wife, with a description of the pain she suffers, and she didn't even have anything to do with the prank. Which obviously completely sours the story. The worst is VIII, 7 (which the translator emphasises his disgust of in the footnotes) where a widow a man is trying to woo pretends to be interested but leaves him out in the cold all night instead. So he takes revenge in a horrific fashion where she nearly dies and the injuries she suffers are written about in grotesque and disturbing detail. It's also the longest story in the book (!).

There's also some stories which are tragic romances or fairy/folk tale style retellings of things like nobles suffering and then later being restored to their rightful place. That style is... OK. They don't really stand out but they're still well told.

Obviously it's sort of a ridiculous thing to want but if the book had the worst offenders for sexism cut I would wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone. As is, I still think it's definitely worth reading but you probably want to read the quick summary of the story which introduces each one and skip any which have obvious dodgy plot points. In fact, this approach is endorsed by the author in his epilogue! ( )

The Decameron (1353) By Giovanni Boccaccio 6/23/23

Why I picked this book up: it was the next in The Banned Books Compendium: 32 Classic Forbidden Books by Gringory Lukin (Editor) I was selected for in April, 2023

Thoughts: many stories based on class, a lot of lust, religious based disrespect, a lot of death/killing at the end of stories trickery and overall not very funny, rather smutty tales. There is clear difference between love and lust IOM. The woman, the queens telling the stories were just like the men, or kings telling the stories, seemed immature and a waste for me to read. This book was during transition in history.

Why I finished this read: I found these stories rather difficult to get through for me. They were not really worth finishing but I forced myself. I will not read them again.

Stars rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars ( )

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 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. ( )

'The Decameron' (by Giovanni Boccaccio; narrated by Simon Russell Beale as Boccaccio and a Full Cast) - Escaping the Plague that has infested Florence (1348), ten young man and women head to countryside retreats and there proceed to entertain themselves by each telling a story every night over the course of a couple weeks. Each evening, a new theme (e.g., friendship, wisdom, cleverness...) for the stories is set by one of those appointed as "King" or "Queen" for the next day. Overall, the stories are light, amusing, only slightly risqué and, do not veer into the preachiness of 'The Canterbury Tales' (by Geoffrey Chaucer); But ultimately, many of the anecdotes use the same plot devices, such as lust & love, unfaithful wives, non-celibate friars and profligate men... and start to sound the same regardless of the stated theme. Still, it's a pleasantly surprising departure from the expected reverence and morality of the Medieval Ages when the Roman Catholic Church held sway over everyday life in the Western World. This translation from the vernacular Italian uses modern British phrases like, "dressed to the nines" and "he got a (sic)... pasting" and; the audio is performed by British narrators-- so there are times when things don't sound quite "right"; but a remarkable work nonetheless. Includes original music and singing. ( )