The Importance of Fun (The Decameron, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, editor Wayne A. Rebhorn returns to discuss his first encounter with Boccaccio, the nature of translating the text's layered meanings from Italian to English, and modern film adaptations of The Decameron. 

Wayne A. Rebhorn is the Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas, where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron won the 2014 PEN Center USA’s Literary Award for Translation.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Decameron, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393427882.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Mark]: You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Chirino with Michael von Cannon producing. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio as we interview its translator and editor Wayne A. Rebhorn. In part one, we discussed Boccaccio's life and background, the form and content of the Decameron, and the project of translating this masterpiece. In this second episode, we learn more about Wayne Rebhorn's relationship with this author and his famous text, how he first encountered it, the way the Decameron has been adapted, Wayne's favorite line, and so much more. Wayne A. Rebhorn is the Mildred Hayek Vadsek and John Roman Vadsek Chair in English at the University of Texas where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation of Boccaccio's Decameron won the 2014 Penn Center USA's Literary Award for Translation. It is great to have him back with us today. Wayne Rebhorn, welcome back to the Norton Library podcast.  

[Wayne]: Thank you. I'm happy to be back.  

[Mark]: Happy to have you back and happy to continue discussing your edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. And maybe we can start. I have the very handsome Norton Library edition in hand right now. Do you have any reaction to the design of the cover? Is there a reason that it is so designed? 

[Wayne]: That is like the third version of my Decameron. This was intended for, I think, the market was going to be, uh, like high school students perhaps and college students.  

[Mark]: Yes.  

[Wayne}: The first edition––it was a hardback and it had two pictures from two illustrations from a 15th century French translation of one of the stories. In fact, it's the first story of the Fourth Day, one of the tragic stories in The Decameron. And there are like three snippets from that, three illustrations from that French translation. But then when The Decameron seemed to be gaining some traction with the public, Norton decided to issue a paperback and they completely redesigned the cover. This one has a picture of uh Titian's Venus of Urbino. It's a nude. She's reclining and in reclining position and the, uh, the designers of the the cover––I wish I could say it was me but it wasn't––uh, have her, you know, it's just a clip from, it's not the whole picture, but she's lying there and you can see it goes from her head to her belly button more or less with her breasts exposed and so on. And the big D for The Decameron kind of wraps around her and part of it comes out of her head and the swirl of the back of the D, the straight part of the D is actually curved but goes right over her right breast. So, it's kind of focusing you on that. It's like I mean, you know, it's the a bad boy cover for a bad boy writer.  

[Mark]: Of course. Yeah. So, this edition, this Norton Library edition is sort of custardy yellow with hints of brown. 

[Wayne]: Yeah.  

[Mark]: It's very striking edition. Wayne, do you remember when you first encountered Boccaccio? 

[Wayne]: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Vividly as a matter of fact. I was maybe, I was in high school and I was I think trying to be trying to acquire the kind of education that you'd have as a nice, you know, literate middle class person. And I bought, I've had one of those books, I don't remember what it was, that said, "Here are the hundred books you have to read to be, you know, the complete man or something, person." And one of them was The Decameron. I don't have any idea why it was in there, but anyway, so, I went to the local branch of the library in Philadelphia where I grew up and I took out the book. It was the Modern Library edition from way back when, and, uh, I never read it to be honest. I didn't, but I what I remember is this: that on the, I guess it was on either the title page or a blank page near the very beginning, someone had written in the copy of the library's copy something like “This is a terrible, wicked, evil book” or something else. 

[Mark]: Wow.  

[Wayne]: And a librarian had pasted a piece of white paper over that, but you could still read the words. And so I'm left with a quandry: is the librarian trying to encourage it or is the library trying to cut it out? And there's no answer to that. 

[Mark]: What better way to get a young guy to continue reading that book, right? 

[Wayne]: Like, it's like having a sign in your bookstore saying “Banned in Boston” or something like that back in the old days. And, uh, so that was my first encounter. It wasn't much of an encounter, but it did sort of set by, you know, give me certain expectations. And then after I started teaching, uh, down here in Texas, I, uh, I taught, I worked up a course on the European Renaissance and eventually I––I don't think the first go round, but by the second or third, I certainly included Boccaccio and then he became, I gave him more time as the, uh, semesters wore on and I realized that this was a great text not taught, not read nearly enough and that, um, I was fascinated by it and I had things I wanted to say about it. So I expanded some time. We never, he was never like a whole––I actually gave a graduate course completely on Boccaccio once years ago. But other than [that] in my undergraduate course, I always included at least a couple of weeks and the students loved it. They really did. They loved it because one of the things to say about Boccaccio––as I said, his name means, you know, big mouth, this bad boy of western literature who, uh––is that his text is filled with really, uh, wonderful illicit lovemaking and other things like that. And though it's a, it's a “bad” text in that sense, it's wicked, he doesn't use any bad words. The only word he does use that's bad in any sense at all is the word culo in Italian which means ass or asshole. Uh, and only two or three times. He never ever refers to, never uses the big “F” or its equivalent in Italian. He has, he has euphemisms for that. X And you know the thing about euphemisms, especially as they're consciously used as Boccaccio does, it's like, they're fun. It's a twofer. You get to know what the thing is it's hiding but it's not really hiding it, so you get the pleasure of watching him transform it. My favorite, one of my favorite stories is about a woman in North Africa who's heard about Christianity, but doesn't know what it is. She's very beautiful, by the way. This story is her name is Alatiel. And she goes out into the desert looking for a hermit. She finds a hermit. And the first one says, "No, no, you go away." Because he knows that she'd be a temptation. And the next hermit doesn't say [anything] and finally she comes one hermit whose name is Rustico which means rustic which means, you know, rube, and he says “Sure, you know, you can stay,” and of course he's aroused by her and so forth and so on and next thing he knows he you know he's gotten himself undressed and her undressed and she's amazed. She looks at his erection and says “What is that?” and he says, “Oh,” he says, “That's the devil and the devil's causing me a lot of problems and just making me miserable and so forth and so on,” he said and then she asked, “Well, what's––I don't have that thing. What do I have there instead? He says, “Oh, that's hell. You have hell.” And then he gets her, of course, to put the devil back in hell. And you know, you get the sort of, sort of almost voyeristic pleasure of imagining this couple doing the deed, and the other pleasure of how wonderfully transparently disguised it is. And of course, the story has a wonderful final twist which is marvelous. At the end, he finds he can have her as often as he wants. He finds he can't keep up with her. She's always asking him, “Let's do it again.” And he can't do it now. “We have to postpone it.” Blah blah blah. And so finally he sends her back to civilization or to her city because he can't, he can't keep up with her. So, it's a wonderful it starts off being a a kind of sexist, anti-feminist thing where the woman is the victim of the man's, uh, sexual desires [and is] too stupid to figure out what's happening. And it turns out at the end, he gets his comeuppance or come-down-ance or whatever it would be. So, it's a wonderful, wonderful story.  

[Mark]: As a translator, do you keep the euphemisms? Are you trying to maintain Boccaccio's same register or how do you what's your technique in that situation? 

[Wayne]: Oh, I absolutely keep the euphemisms. You've got to do that. And so, unfortunately, they're not specifically Italian in the sense that you can't really translate it. Putting the devil back in hell ... once I told my students, I used to tell my students “Once you've read that, you'll never use that phrase again, right?” Or sometimes it would be thwacking her wool or thwacking the wool, smacking the wool, which of course is––I don't have to explain that, but that's also a metaphor for sex. In fact, Boccaccio himself talks about in, in the very conclusion to his work about how some people faulted him for this and that. One of them is that he doesn't say euphemisms, but he'll say things like mortars and pestles. You know what a mortar is, it’s a bowl that you sort of grind stuff in and with a long sort of phallic like, uh, pestle which of course is pesting, is beating the––whatever's in the in the mortar, and so he prefers that kind of thing. He talks about how, uh, friars, I guess clergy in general but the friars because they are celibate, you know, have a lot of, uh, water stored up in their mill ponds. That's when you, you know, you store the water in a mill pond so the water wheel could continue to grind grain and stuff in the dry seasons, so they've got a lot of water there so they can really do it when they do it. And so, it's one of those wonderful things that you, the more you go on, the more pleasure you get, both vicariously through the sexual situations and also with a through the woody language.  

[Mark]: In your experience, having taught this to, uh, generations of readers, what do you find is the challenge for 21st century readers? 

[Wayne]: Well, there's one challenge... I think it would be kind of the naive challenge: “Did they really do that and talk ... in those days?” It's like they forget that they have been engendered by their parents whom they can't imagine ever having sex, right? And so think about earlier generations. Somehow the world produced itself, but you think, “Oh, they couldn't, they couldn't ... did they really say that? Did they really think that?” And the answer is yes, kiddos. They really did. I don't have ... my kids are not that naive. My students are not that naive, but still there's a bit of “Wow, they did that back then? They talked like that back then?” You think that you've like, you go, all young people think they've invented things like sex. They haven't. It's been around for a very, very long time. And so one of the things is to disabuse them of the notion that, you know, that we're ... that they've invented the world they [live in] and they invented things that have been around for a long time. The other thing is to get them to see [is] that even in texts which some, which will strike one as very different, not just with the bit of language I leave in from Italian like the word messidor which means sir or mister––I keep that in the original Italian, I explain it but it's, uh, there to give them a little sense of, well this is not our world, this is a different language, a different culture––um, is that they get to see that human beings are alike and have been alike for generations, centuries, for millennia, but also because of the little linguistic difference, no, they really haven't been quite alike. You know, we don't ... we think like we think that because everybody's always had sexual urges or what have you or had sexual satisfaction in intercourse that of course we're all the same. Yes, we are and no, we're not. And that's the pleasure of doing a translation partly: to sort of bring them so close, but keep them at a slight difference so they always sense that they were not we're not Boccaccio's generation. We're not living in this 14th century.  

[Mark]: Is Boccacio's original language easy to work with as a translator? Is there a way that we can sort of conceptualize it compared to let's say Dante or Petrarch? 

[Wayne]: Italian is an inflected language which means that they could do more with participles and things because the endings tell you how that that word relates to other words in a sentence. And so, Boccaccio in the narrative portions of the Decameron, which he himself is narrating, or the narrators, the 10 people who get together and tell these stories are, and when they talk to one another and so forth and so on. Some of it would be what we would call just conversational, but a lot of it is very formal. I mean, sentences that go on for half a para––for half a page and so forth and so on because they're––and that's easier to do in Italian than in English because of the inflected nature of the language. But that said, that's a problem for me as a translator. That was a problem. How do you take a sentence that goes on for like 75 words with lots of subordinate clauses and turn it into English? If you did it exactly the way Boccaccio wrote it, you would create an awful version in English. So, you have to break it up and sometimes you'll have to decide, you know, participial clauses ... are they about something before something or at the same time or whatever? So, it's really, I often think of myself as a, uh, as a translator, as a kind of puzzle solver. How do you take this sentence which seems puzzling to you in a foreign language or could seem puzzling to you if you wrote it just as it is in English, and turn it into something that actually works? That was one of the real challenges of it. And I think more or less I succeeded in doing that. Now there are also places especially where lowerclass characters talk where there just, it's just standard conversation, or not standard but it's conversation [which is] much easier to do and so on. But so, and that brings me to another point about Boccaccio: there's no one single Boccaccio style. There's the more formal stuff that he himself writes in places where the narrator, the author is writing, is narrating and then there's slightly less formal but still very formal conversation among the ten young men and women who are telling these stories. And then there's the stuff that like, peasants and things say, which are, you know, short sentences and, uh, sometimes with euphemisms in them but usually not and so on. So that it's, it was a challenge to try and keep that level of stylistic distinction and Boccaccio helped me, of course, because he has already built it in, in terms of length, like the length of sentences, but when the narrators, the ten narrators are talking and setting up a story, they're talking in very formal prose and I think that's–– when the Italians look back on the Decameron and look back in the 16th century, certainly after, they saw that as the kind of defining feature of his prose. 

[Mark]: Do the ten narrators speak alike? Do they have distinct voices? 

[Wayne]: They do in terms of their construction of sentences, but there's, uh, there's a difference in that the seven women, uh––remember Boccaccio lived in a society where there were differences between men and women, and women were seen as not being public figures and confined to the home and so forth and so on. In fact, one of the things that Boccaccio says is, he's writing this story, these stories for love––the whole work is for lovelorn women who are trapped in their houses. You can't get out to meet your lovers or whatever. And, uh, so, uh, women were not expected to be public figures, uh, and not to have the kind of command of language that men in public arena would supposedly have and yet they have it. Now that's one of the kind of implicit revolutionary things that Bocaccio is doing because seven of the ten narrators are women. The men, on the other hand, and there are three of them, uh, have a distinctive role because, first of all, they have what we might call speaking names: names that say something. The one who, uh, ends this collection––it's the last set of stories about magnanimity and generosity––is named Panfilo, which means loving of all or all loving. The one who initiates the tragic stories of day four is Filostrato, which Boccaccio thought––I think correctly, incorrectly but nevertheless––was someone who's laid low by love. So, of course he's going to choose to have stories like that. And Dioneo, the third of the men, whose name refers to like, it's the equivalent of Dionysis, and he introduces the stories in the seventh day about how women play tricks on their husbands, and so, which is why the seventh, eighth, and ninth stories get the characters, the narrators into a kind of an impassee of trouble. That trouble that they are talking about, human quality, intelligence, wit, cleverness, storytelling, that doesn't necessarily have happy outcomes. I mean they're happy enough but like, you know, people almost die and things like that. And so, Dioneo, of course is, he's the bad boy among the bad boys and so he says that, tells that that story. And in fact, he tells, he gets the privilege of telling the last story of every day after about Day Two, and the very last story in the collection, 1010, is about the so-called patient Griselda. She became a kind of standard figure. There's even a play in English I think, I've not read, it called The Patient Grizzle. Uh, anyway, and she's patient because her husband––she's a peasant––she's elevated to become wife of a nobleman, uh, by him because she wants, he wants a wife. It's totally compliant, I guess. And he subjects her to horrible abuse, pretends he's killed her kids, says he’s being married to somebody else who turns out to be her daughter and so forth, and she adores it patiently. And at the end, he says, "You've been such a good woman. I'm going to restore everything for you." And so, at the end, he is the example of magnanimity. Hahaha.  

[Mark]: Right. [Laughter] 

[Wayne]: Because he restores everything to her that he’s take it away. And when Dioneo finishes telling this story, which is a sendup of the whole idea of magnanimity, he says at the end, you know, basically, “ If I were Griselda, I'd go out and find myself some somebody in the country and go have sex with him, you know, after the marquis chucked you out.” And so, I think that the males have this capacity for kind of, uh, commentary on what everybody else is doing. And that's a wonderful commentary, especially because he's, as I say, the bad boy of the bad boys in the text.  

[Mark]: Wayne, in the entire Decameron, do you have a favorite line? 

[Wayne]: I do, and I think I wrote it down here somewhere, and if I can, if I remember correctly it's, “[Italian].” The mouth that's been kissed doesn't lose its good fortune, its advantage, but it renews itself like the moon because the moon goes from a, you know, a slit to a fold and back again and so on. This line was, by the way, borrowed or not––this proverb was borrowed and reworded slightly for Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, and, uh, it becomes, uh, slightly, uh, they have he wants it to, [unintelligible] wants it to rhyme but it's, actually the last word of the first line is not ventuna, which is in Verdi because ventuna and luna rhyme, it's ventura and luna. Ventura means like, adventure. It's like, it's luck, good luck. And of course, this is a story about how––it's from the second day. It's about a woman who has had sex with nine men, because she's very naive, all over the Mediterranean from one end to the other and finally has passed off as a proper virgin and married to someone at the very end. So, you can see the sort of subversive implications of that, and then that's where he cites the proverb. [Italian] It’s, you know, a kissed mouth is always good because, you know, it reduces itself like the moon. And I think, reading this, I was thinking about this the other day and I said, “Hmm, you think about the moon, it starts off as a sliver––” 

[Mark]: Yeah.  

[Wayne]: You know, a curved sliver, becomes full, and closes down again. It opens up and closes down again. It opens up, closes down again. What am I talking about, if you're talking about another level of interpretation? We’re talking about sex. I'm also talking about a mouth that opens and closes. It opens and closes. It opens and closes. And so that's the kind of richness inside the stories that you get. Boccaccio takes a common proverb, which seems to be sort of a standard a celebration of love, and it's, you know, “The kissed mouth always renews itself like the moon,” and it has a tiny bit of a dirty or sexual implication and it also has something about speaking and shutting and speaking and shutting with your mouth which, of course, is really what the whole, the whole collection is about. And of course, Boccaccio's name comes from the word boca in Italian, which means mouth. And so, it's a big mouth, a dirty mouth, a loud mouth. And all of that sort of stuff plays together. And that's, uh, one of the things where I think you miss a little bit if you don't know the Italian, but not too much. 

[Mark]: Beautiful proverb. Do you have a hot take about the Decameron? Something counterintuitive where you are swimming against the stream of the centuries that have been offering, uh, reactions to this work.  

[Wayne]: Sure. Well, let's put it this way. Um, when we encounter world literature, I think there's a tendency to treat it a bit like the Bible. You know, a big fat book with onion skin pages, because there's so much in it and we treat it with reverence. And I think Boccaccio’s text, the Decameron, tells you, “You don't do it that way. You should enjoy it in terms of its pleasures.” Let me, let me add something to that. Comedy is second rate in most people's mind. We, of course, we love comedy. Look at all the sitcoms on TV, all the funny plays we see, all the movies, the romcoms and so on. We love comedy. But if you said, if you had one book by Shakespeare, one play by Shakespeare to take on a desert island for the rest of your life? Of course, Lear or Hamlet or something like a tragedy, a great big play, not Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like It or something like that. That's wrong. Comedy has a place and it's dear to our hearts, dearer than we think. But when you think, “Oh, serious literature, it can’t be serious literature, this is comedy.” Of course it can be. Of course it can be because laughter is wonderful. It's a release. It's pleasure. It's an affirmation of pleasure rather than an acceptance of pain. 

[Mark]: So how does that attitude manifest itself? How do you approach this where it's not sacrosanct, but you are kind of working with the text?  

[Wayne]: I need my students to see that there's something serious about the pleasure we get from a story where we're imagining a couple making love together or somebody using his cleverness to get clever wit to get out of a jam and that sort of thing. There's one story, very short story, in the sixth day, about a guy who's a cook for a nobleman and the nobleman's go out hunting. He's hunted a crane. I don't know how they ate cranes in those days. Boggles my mind. But be that as it may, he's supposed to prepare that for dinner. But his girlfriend comes by and says, "Oh, that looks so good” and so she gets one of the legs of the crane. So the guy serves it to the master and the master says, "Hm, there's a problem here. It's only one leg." And the cook says, "Uh, oh, well, that's just what they have." And the master says, “No, no, no. We're going to go take a look and see and if it turns out that they've got two legs, you're in trouble.” So, they go out the next day and he's looking and they go out to a marsh or wherever the cranes are hanging out and, uh, a lot of them are standing on one leg, pulling the other leg up. They do that. I don't know about crane lore, but at any rate, uh, and, uh, the cook says, "Well, look, there's just any, there's just one leg." And the, uh, master says, “Oh, no, that's not true” and he he goes, "Hoo hoo hoo" And the cranes, of course, hearing the sound, freak out. They put their other legs down and they move away. And, uh, the cook thinks––is desperate, of course. Here's the punishment about to be inflicted on him. He says, "Oh, well, if you just yelled hoo hoo hoo to the crane that I served last night, it would have had––we would have seen the other leg” or something like that. And so the master, the master is great because the master says, "That's really funny. I love the guy” and he gets off scot-free. And that's, that's sort of like the moral of the Decameron. If you use your wits–– 

[Mark]: Yeah.  

[Wayne]: ––you will often get yourself out of a real jam like that, which could involve pain, even be life-threatening. 

[Mark]: Mmhmm.  

[Wayne]: That's what, that's what I love about the Decameron. It tells us not that we have to endure tragedy. We have to. Not that life could be awful, as in the plague or as in the pandemic, but that we can make something out of it that provides us with fun, and fun is important. Laughter is important.  

[Mark]: With all of that in mind, over the last centuries, how has the Decameron been repurposed, presented using other means or genres or media, in ways that readers might, uh, encounter?  

[Wayne]: Yeah, I think as I said, it's something of a stealth classic and so it has more presence in Italian literature than in, uh, European or–– 

[Mark]: Right.  

[Wayne]: ––literature generally and that's partly because I say, there's a prejudice against comedy, like it's not as serious as tragedy, but I think this text and comedy in general is very serious, but at any rate, um, I think that there was a a recent fairly recent, uh, series on Netflix called the Decameron, but it was a travesty to the Decameron. It focused only on the ten narrators and had them, you know––it's very funny. But having them do, uh, sort of silly things, part of the fun was that, was in that, and also having them having all sorts of illicit sexual relations and stuff like that. That is not at all what happens in the Decameron itself. The ten young men and women are the, are a model of decorum. Although we know that several of the men and several of the women love one another and so forth and so on, there is no indication in the text that any hank, that there's any hanky-pankying going on. Not at all. And that's part of the thing. Here's these 10 very decorous young people telling stories that would make would embarrass your parents, you know, if you told them to them. And, but again, without any bad words. 

[Mark]: So, is this the first time that we've tried to adapt it cinematically or have people tried it before?  

[Wayne]: There's a there's a movie done by Pierre Pasolini from 1971 and it's a very good movie but it's––he was communist and he, uh, sympathized with, you know, the lower classes against the middle class and things like that, and he, uh, I think he does maybe six or seven stories in the course of this this thing, and it's framed by the first story, the story in which the worst man in the world turns himself through a phony confession into the best man. And what happens? What Pasolini does is he turns it into an indictment of the clergy using this man because he becomes a saint. Who benefits from that? Well, of course, we all do theoretically, but it's the clergy because they get more people to come to their church and give more in donations and so forth and so on for San Ciappelletto, for St. Ciappelletto. And what he's done, of course, is he's sorely screwed them. It's interesting that his real name was Ciapparrello, which means a log or a tree trunk. Okay. And so, he's given, he turned himself into Ciappelletto which sounds a bit like chapelet, which in French, which means a rosary and so the peaceful people think he's really chapelet, he’s really a holy guy but in fact he's Ciappelletto. He's just given them the log, if you interpret that as I hope you will. 

[Mark]: So you would not recommend the recent Netflix series?  

[Wayne]: No, absolutely not. You can watch the Pasolini film which is available, and it's just––it's also by the way, 1971, full frontal nudity for men as well as women. How about that as an enticement? 

[Mark]: I see. One more question, Wayne, and this is about your act of translating this. I wonder, I can imagine that Decameron has been translated time and time again into English. What was your process in terms of a) negotiating with those earlier translations or seeking the original? How far back can you go and how pure a copy of Boccaccio's original, um, can you encounter? 

[Wayne]: Well, we do have, as I said, he copied––it's funny, he met Petrarch and he decided he would be a much more serious Christian after meeting Petrarch and he disavowed his Decameron and so forth and so on, but then he copied it out in his own hand later on in his life. So, we know that he had an attraction to it, and that's the copy that's preserved in Berlin with a few things missing, which the Paris, uh, version which is not in his hand I believe, uh, make for us, give us. 

[Mark]: So you're able to work with the original as close to the original as possible. 

[Wayne]: Yes. Yes. Yes. And there and, uh, yeah. And that's been, that's been edited and trans––I think John Singleton, who taught at Johns Hopkins, had translated it based on the original and you can use his translation as a reference point. Although it's a terrible, terrible translation. It's, you know, it tries to reproduce Italian syntax in English and you simply can't do that. 

[Mark]: Yeah. 

[Wayne]: You can write more complex sentences in English, but not the way the Italians might, and simple sentences as well. So, I think that actually, looking back on it, there were days when I would get, I would do just one paragraph. I’d feel defeated but the whole process was wonderful. It really was. And, uh, I also translated Machiavelli, which is a totally different kind of writer, but, uh, not as challenging as Boccaccio was, I must say.  

[Mark]: When you translated the Decameron, did you go from beginning to end? 

[Wayne]: Pretty much, yeah. I remember being ... I went, I did the first three days, and then––the second and third day, the second day has a lot of long, long stories because it's about people dealing with fortune and all the ups and downs of fortune––quite literally ups and downs in many senses of the word. As you can imagine, uh, I'm teasing your imagination here too–– 

[Mark]: [Laughter] 

[Wayne]: And the, uh, and I finished day three and I think I felt a little defeated because it was taking much, much longer ... in fact, it took seven years, more or less, from beginning to end. And, uh, it was published in 2013, which was Boccaccio's 700th birthday. And I turned 70 in in 2013. So, 777, as I've told people, at least it wasn't 666. 

[Mark]: No, no, that's absolutely perfect. Wayne Rebhorn, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Boccaccio's The Decameron. Thank you so much, Wayne. 

[Wayne]: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. 

[Mark]: The Norton Library edition of The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, edited by Wayne A. Rebhorn, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.