Boccaccio’s masterpiece of storytelling has had many English translations, the first in 1620 (anonymous, but attributed to John Florio): most had additions or omissions of paratexts, some were without Boccaccio’s framing tale or authorial interventions, others censored passages offensive to the church; and until the twentieth century, all either left in Italian, recast in French, or omitted the erotic tale of Alibech and Rustico (Dec. 3.10), and occasionally that of Donno Gianni (9.10). The first complete and unexpurgated edition appeared in 1886, translated in a rather archaic English by John Payne, though later editions of this translation revert to masking the two offending tales in languages other than English. Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, Boccaccio’s fortunes in English have improved enormously: several good, complete English translations of the Decameron have appeared, and most are still in print (McWilliam, Musa and Bondanella, Waldman, Nichols). Rebhorn’s is the most recent, and, appearing in 2013, it is a fitting contribution to the seventh centennial celebration of the author’s birth. This new edition should have broad appeal and is especially useful for the classroom, since it includes an introduction to the life and times of Boccaccio, a comprehensive guide to reading the Decameron, and copious endnotes that provide historical and literary context for each of the 100 tales (reproducing much of the vast research found in the notes to Vittore Branca’s Italian edition); a few of the other contemporary translations include notes, but none so extensive. Rebhorn also has an occasional footnote to explain something that might otherwise be lost in the text at hand, for example, allusions in a name that would not be perceived by an anglophone reader; and in his headnotes he glosses the names of the Decameron’s ten internal narrators, explains the canonical hours, the way that time of day was rendered in medieval Italy, and defends his decision to leave in Italian titles like Madonna, Messere, Frate, and others common in the text, in order to preserve some of the original’s social context. Finally, he provides a short bibliography of books and articles in English as suggestions for future reading.

Rebhorn also, in his introduction, offers a new reading of the structure of the collection that should foster scholarly debate. Differing with the evolutionary reading of the days proposed by Branca and others, in which there is progress from the errors corrected in day 1 to the magnanimous gestures of 10, or the more recent circular view, proposed by Barolini, of a movement away from and then back to Florence and to the rational control and compassion the plague had destroyed, Rebhorn argues that the first six days of stories show man’s generally successful use of his intellect in the struggle with Fortune and in the pursuit of love, while in the final four days he sees a reproposal and contestation of the more positive vision put forth earlier.

Rebhorn’s translation is meticulously accurate, and he never lets go of the least detail or emphasis, while rendering Boccaccio’s text in fluid contemporary American English. I take issue with very few of his solutions to problematic passages, and where I do, he is in the company of some of the other contemporary translators. He takes the liberty, often, of adopting Boccaccio’s metaphors quite literally in order to convey the humor and context of the original Italian, which would be lost, at least in part, were he to offer a colloquial English substitution. A case in point is his translation of the insult in which a character is called a pecorone, a term that derives from pecora, meaning “sheep”; he translates it “muttonhead,” while most other translators have opted for a more current “oaf,” “knucklehead,” or “nincompoop.” He finds imaginative solutions for some of the most difficult expressions, such as “millanta e nove,” a nonsense term that suggests an extraordinarily large number, for which he writes “a gazillion and nine.” Sometimes, in the case of adages or proverbs, he has to stray from this close rendering of the Italian for the sake of clarity, but there are many instances in which he seeks to preserve more of the flavor of Boccaccio’s text: for example in Dec. 2.9, an expression that means roughly “you get what you ask for,” he translates “it’s a matter of tit for tat,” so that the meaning is clear, and then, literally, “when an ass bumps into a wall, the wall bumps him right back.” Rebhorn also finds clever solutions to translating rhymed passages of the original, as in the humorous incantation with which in 7.1 Tessa warns her lover to stay away: “Bogeyman, bogeyman, who goes walking by night, / Tail erect you came here, tail erect take your flight.”

It is a masterful translation. My only regret is that the cloth edition is so big and heavy that it is hard to hold in one’s hands and is more comfortably read on a book stand. Perhaps the paperback edition will solve this problem.