Penguins on Parade: Tales from the Decameron!

Some Penguin Classics hew close to an academic model and try in their good conscience to be gateways to richer wonders. Once such gateway that’s always been attractive to teachers is an abridgement of Giovanni Boccaccio’s gigantic masterpiece, The Decameron. In its unedited form, the book is a cinder block in size, one hundred stories a group of Florentine nobles tell each other in their country retreats from the rampaging plague stalking the city. The stories and their delicate interconnections are an immeasurable gift to readers, but the unabridged work can be terrifying to high school and college freshman readers encountering it for the first time.

Hence the appeal of books like this svelte new volume from Penguin Classics, Tales from the Decameron, translated by Peter Hainsworth, who takes thirty-two of Boccaccio’s liveliest and best-known Decameron stories and presents them to readers who might balk at tackling the whole one hundred. And Hainsworth’s philosophy for conveying these thirty-two tales in English is admirably straightforward:

Boccaccio’s language poses particular problems for the translator. Keeping anything like his complex syntax in modern English seems out of the question. The risks of losing the free, conversational elements embedded in it, and ending up with ponderous, old-fashioned literary prose, are just too great. I decided that if the results were to be as readable as Boccaccio’s original was to his Florentine contemporaries in the upper merchant class, the sentences needed to be broken down, and in places I was ready to opt for very short unites indeed, although still syntactically and grammatically correct by the standards of ‘good’ contemporary English prose.

Readers familiar with some of the more popular of the many English-language translations of the Decameron won’t find it difficult to call to mind an example or two of the “ponderous, old-fashioned literary prose” Hainsworth invokes, and it’s fair to say his own selection of highlights in this volume mostly avoids such languors. The climactic moment of Masetto’s boisterously erotic tale from the third day of storytelling, for instance, comes across with a pleasing bounce:

‘Lady,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard it said that one cock is plenty for ten hens, but that ten men can barely satisfy one woman, and then only with an effort. And here I am having to serve nine of them. I couldn’t go on like this for anything you gave me in the world. Or rather, with what I’ve done so far, I’m in such a state I can’t even begin again, let alone go on. Either you wish me well and let me go, or you find some way of arranging things better.’

If your ears pricked up at that “cock” in the first line, they were no doubt intended to, and that kind of quiet playfulness runs throughout this inviting introduction to the much larger world of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. It’s a tone of well-mannered mischief that’s well reflected in the choice of one of the more whimsical pages from the classic old Rockwell Kent Boccaccio illustrations. And Hainsworth’s picks are unerringly on-target: he’s included all of the best of the Decameron here, the stories most likely to entice newcomers to move on to the splendid Penguin Classics unabridged edition. Once they’ve done that, it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever revisit this volume, but that’s as it should be – by then, it will have done its work.