By Oliver B. Pollak
RICHMOND, California. –Some sixty or more years ago my parents facilitated my sex education by leaving Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, illustrated in 1949 by Rockwell Kent, on the coffee table. Adolescent curiosity took care of the rest. Kent introduced me to pornography or erotica before Playboy.
From the late 1950s the Book of the Month Club swelled our aspiring middle class bookshelves with reference books, classics, novels, recent literature, along with the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia. But not Boccaccio’s Decameron. Perhaps the BMC, wanting to offend the least number of people, steered clear of sexual and religious controversy.
My colleague, William Pratt, pointed out that politically adventurous and outspoken illustrator Kent had altercations with the Joseph McCarthy era House Un-American Activities Committee, analogous to Boccaccio’s criticism of the church.
I own six illustrated 20th century English translations of the Decameron and tapped local libraries, interlibrary loan and HathiTrust Digital Library for a few more. We visited Certaldo in Tuscany, Boccaccio’s 1313 birthplace. My bottle of Boccaccio red wine, probably acquired at an airport duty free shop, was thoughtlessly jettisoned while downsizing.
The Black Death struck Europe between 1347 and 1351 and killed 30 to 60 percent of the population. Boccaccio confronting the catastrophe with irreverence, loss of faith in the religious order, and human passion, finished the Decameron by 1353. Our Decameron stands for far more than raunchy illicit sex. Boccaccio (1313-1375) is a not so distant contemporary to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), and England’s Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) The murder at the center of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), which sold 50,000,000, occurred in 1327.
Boccaccio, writing in Italian rather than Latin, reached a larger audience. The Decameron has been translated into at least 29 languages. The first English translation dates from 1620. Each generation needs its translators and illustrators, especially the Decameron which challenged concepts of pornography, obscenity and censorship.
Gradually liberalized mores invited more graphic editions. There are at least twelve English translations, including six from 1900 to 2013. Two translations and at least ten editions appeared while Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, led Italy from 1922-1943.
The nature of translation can be applied to crucial passages or characterizations in the Conversion of the Jew story, the second story of one hundred stories told over ten days as the young adults entertain each other while fleeing the black death. It is about the conversion of a Parisian Jewish mercer-draper-silk-cloth merchant by his admiring fellow Christian merchant.
Comparing translations reveals differences in the name of the story, the names of the characters and the characterization of the Jew. The title of the story appears as “Abraham the Jew,” “A Jew named Abraham,” “A Jew called Abraham.”
The Rockwell Kent illustration from Day 1, no 2, “servants of their bellies,” intimates Abraham’s vision of the licentious clergy in Rome.
The name of the proselytizing Christian friend appears as Iehannot Chevigny, Jeannot de Chevigny, Jehannot de Chevigny, Chevigné, Giannotto di Civigni, Civignì (with accented i), and other variations. The name of the Jew, Abraham, never changes, but his faith does as he commits apostasy. Upon baptism he took the name Giovanni.
The description of Abraham varies slightly but are consistent:
1620 “a very rich Jew…a man of very direct communication…honesty and loyal dealing”
1741 “a very honest man”
1886 “very honest and trusty man”
1903 “a man of great wealth, most loyal and righteous.”
1930 “very upright honest man”
1977 “straightforward, trusty person”
2013 “an extremely upright and honest man”
The book is about 665 years old, and has been translated repeatedly into English for 398 years. Despite rising and falling tides of anti-Semitism, there has been little deviation in the positive description of Abraham. Could Abraham be an exception from other Jews as the Good Samaritan was an exception from average Samaritans? Thus the exemplary Jew needs to be saved in Christ. Can particularistic philo-semitism hide anti-Semitism?
A longer historical view notes the Expulsion of Jews in England by King Edward in 1290 and in France by King Philip IV the Fair in 1306. They were invited back. The practice was repeated.
The City without Jews, Hugo Bettauer’s 1922 novel and 1924 silent film, had several precedents including nativist immigration policy. American interest in Italy heightened with the early popularity of Il Duce, but his relationship to Hitler, support of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, distanced most English speakers from fascism. Studebaker even dropped its Dictator model.
Boccaccio’s novel, its translators and readers reveal the hold of pandemics on human imagination including the 1918 Spanish Influenza, witness A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978) by Barbara Tuchman, The Black Death (2005) by John Aberth, and The Terror of History (2011) by Teofilo Ruiz. The subject of translation has been examined by Joan Acocella who praised Wayne Reborn’s 2013 translation (New Yorker, 2013), and Tim Parks who explains why he declined to translate it (New York Review of Books, 2016).
The Black Death, 14th century apostasy, Rockwell Kent’s illustrations, sex education, Mussolini’s flamboyance, several translation and myriad editions gave the Decameron iconic proportions. A Florence bookstore had Boccaccio volumes priced for the tourist trade. I recall the admonition, buy your Willa Cather outside Nebraska, things are held dearer by locals. The value of rereading classics is even greater.
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Pollak, an attorney and professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, is a SDJW correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com