The Decameron

For no good reason, I’ve been reading some of the stories from the Decameron when I have a few minutes.

Well, maybe the timing is the reason: each story is quick and easy to read. When I don’t have a lot of time or mental energy, I can open the thing at random and know I’ll only have a few pages to read.

Practically every story seems to be about sex. People having it and figuring out ways to hide it from wives, husbands, or parents. People wanting it and figuring out ways to get it. Different expressions for it and innuendoes about it. It’s like being in the 8th grade again, where everything takes a sexual turn.

One of the stories is about a monk who convinces a young, extremely naive, woman that the devil is in his pants and needs to be put back in hell. Guess where hell is? So night after night they work together to put the devil back in hell. (Read the story in an old, but not TOO old translation.)

The reason this story sticks with me is that the last time I read it, I was shocked to the point of throwing the book away and avoiding the Decameron for 10 years.

No, I wasn’t shocked by the sex. I was shocked by how the publishers had not only bowdlerized this important historical and literary work, but how they lied about their reasons for doing so.

The book had been printed in India, and the publishers were prudish enough to decide to leave all the juicy bits of the story in the original Italian. Fair enough. I mean, I don’t like that decision, but at least they didn’t cut out the story entirely.

But then they included an editor’s note that was nothing more than a bald-faced lie. They claimed that the part about putting the devil back into hell was such esoteric material that they couldn’t translate it into English. That, in fact, it couldn’t BE translated. It was old-style sorcery and magic, and the language was impossible to understand.

Man, was I pissed off about that. Where do they get off lying about the very work that they’re producing? Offensive.

I’ll touch on a frequent theme: I’d bet anything that these same editors would be delighted to translate all the scenes of torture and horror that certain other Italians portrayed in their nightmare visions of hell:

___

With six eyes he wept, and from his three chins
Dripped down the teardrops and a bloody froth.

In each mouth he mashed up a separate sinner
With his sharp teeth, as if they were a grinder,
And in this way he put the three through torture.

For the one in front, the biting was as nothing
Compared to the clawing, for at times his back
Remained completely stripped bare of its skin.

___

Then, as today:

Torture=OK.

Sex=SO BAD WE CAN’T EVEN ADMIT THAT IT EXISTS.