![]() ![]() It is as if the work itself is some kind of vast, Borgesian commentary on the very idea of storytelling. And, of course, Boccaccio himself had taken the plots from any number of pre-existing originals. ![]() You'll find here the sources of several Shakespeare plays, or episodes within them, as well as Keats's "Isabella or, The Pot of Basil" and Swift's A Tale of a Tub. ![]() The stories are largely grouped thematically: stories of happy and unhappy love, the tricks wives play on their husbands, the tricks everyone plays on everyone else, and so on. There is nothing obscure here.įor those who don't know the backdrop, we have seven women and three men, escaping from plague-ravaged Florence in 1348, who pass the time by telling each other 10 stories a day over the course of a fortnight 100 stories in all, what with time off for work and devotion. My old Penguin Classics copy, GH McWilliam's 1971 translation, has no notes at all. ![]() It may seem a bit rich to call something over six and a half centuries old "modern", but look at it this way: this fine new translation, which runs to more than 600 pages, only needs six and a half pages of endnotes - and even those could have been winnowed (the gloss on "as though the poor chap were Epicurus denying the immortality of the soul" is "A Greek philosopher (343-270 BC) who taught that the soul died with the body"). T his is it, the storybook which, one is tempted to say, began the modern European narrative tradition. ![]()
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