Absurdist humour in G. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and its rendering in translations

Abstract

Introduction.Written in the mid-14^th century in the Italian vernacular, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron is a skilful and, for its time, unusual blend of comic, tragic and realistic styles. Of these, the first two remain the most vivid in the collective imagination.

Materials and Methods. The comic inventory of The Decameron includes moments of absurdity that manifest at the lexical, morphological, and semantic levels. This article focuses on how appropriately these moments are conveyed in the Russian translations by Aleksandr Veselovsky (first published in two volumes in 1891 and 1892) and Nikolai Lyubimov (first published in 1970), which differ in style and approach.

Results. A comparative analysis was conducted of excerpts from the Italian original and the two Russian translations. These were compared with a third version — Wayne A. Rebhorn’s translation into American English (published in 2013), which meets the requirements of a modern readership. The analysis is preceded by a brief review of Russian and international studies on the terms ‘absurdity’ and ‘nonsense’ and their rendering in translation. The analysis showed that in Veselovsky’s translation, which is considered more faithful to the original, nonsense is sometimes rendered more freely. Conversely, in Lyubimov’s version — an example of creative translation — it occasionally appears more literally. Generally, moments of nonsense are conveyed less strongly in Russian translations than in the English one.

Conclusion. Further research may involve creating a corpus to document the translation of the most complex linguistic aspects of The Decameron into various languages. This would provide an additional resource for researchers of Boccaccio’s prose and medieval discourse.