From AudioFile
This fourteenth-century Italian book, which inspired Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Balzac, remains one of the most enjoyable anthologies of short stories ever written. Some young unmarried nobles, the "beautiful people" of the age, decide to wait out the Florentine plague in their country estates, amusing each other every evening with earthy stories, some outright bawdy, others pointing to a moral. Nine capable Brits represent the storytellers in Naxos's sampling of a graceful, uncredited translation. Well-chosen music adds to the atmosphere. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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Review
'This new translation of The Decameron is especially valuable for the manner in which it accurately imitates the divergent tones and structures of Boccaccio's prose. Boccaccio's art is an exercise in brinkmanship which leads characters and readers alike into a turmoil of moral and social disorder only to retrieve them within his formal literary structure at the end. In common with the main text, this introduction will prove very useful both to the general reader and to the student unable to read in the Italian.' Christopher C. Stevens. Italian Studies, XLIX, 1994
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