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A contribution to: Echo

Edited by Hannah McIntyre and Hayley O'Kell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 15

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  The fifteenth-century Castilian translation of the Decameron is nothing more than an echo of Boccaccio’s original text. To understand the level of distortion one must consider the textual transmission of the original, both to understand the author’s intentions and to assess whether this corresponded with what early readers actually read. The Italian tradition certainly included personalisation by scribes, with a significant number of manuscripts containing only extracts from the cornice and individual novelle as part of anthologies. It is through this process that we reach the Castilian translation, transmitted through a manuscript (E) and five printed editions, the earliest of which is S. What is striking is that E, by choice of the compiler or scribe, only contains fifty novelle in a disrupted order, omitting the majority of the cornice; S, on the other hand, contains one hundred novelle but, like E, omits the cornice and reorders the novelle. The text of the Decameron has become so distorted in E and S that they transform Boccaccio’s narrative stratification into mere anthology. The textual similarities suggest that E and S are in fact one translation, despite their drastic structural differences, meaning they were copied from different sources sharing a genealogical ancestor. Thus, they are two different redactions of the same echo of Boccaccio’s text.

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