Love Tales of the World — Part 4: More Tales from the Decameron

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Love Tales of the World — Part 4: More Tales from the Decameron. Four more love tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1353), in John Payne's English translation of 1886, told whole and in the order of Boccaccio's own days. In the first, Andrevuola loves Gabriotto, a gardener's son; when he dies suddenly in her garden, she must defend her innocence — and her love — before the Provost of Florence. In the second, Simona and Pasquino are poor young lovers; a sprig of sage, a sudden death, and a trial, and Simona proves her innocence in the most terrible way. In the third, Caterina longs to sleep where she can hear the nightingale sing, and Ricciardo comes to her balcony by night; at dawn her father finds them, and the matter is settled with a marriage. In the fourth, King Charles, come to Count Guy's castle, sees the Count's twin daughters bathing in the fishpond, and is rebuked into honour by their father. Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices. A note on the text: the Decameron tells a hundred tales; these are four of them, chosen for love's own engines, and no claim is made that this reading is complete or that these four stand for the hundred. The frame that holds the hundred together — the company of storytellers, the introductions of the days — is not narrated here; each tale is told whole from its first story paragraph to its last sentence. Three neighbouring tales were passed over by name: Gerbino's, for sword-deaths at sea; Nastagio's, where a spectacle of cruelty is staged to frighten a woman into marriage; and Griselda's, whose husband's sustained cruelty is the tale's whole substance. One name is kept exactly as Boccaccio printed it: Messer Negro da Ponte Carraro is a period Italian family name — a surname, and it refers to no people; apart from it, no period terms in these four tales called for neutral modern renderings. Chapters: 0:35 Introduction 2:14 Andrevuola and Gabriotto 18:04 Simona and Pasquino 26:53 Caterina and the Nightingale 39:30 The King and the Twin Sisters Source: Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1353), in the English translation of John Payne (1886), public domain (Project Gutenberg #23700). Music: "Virtuoso Trio in Motion", an instrumental from the KacheliTV music library, heard at the opening, between the tales, and at the close; "Raga at Dawn 2", an instrumental from the same library, plays quietly beneath the reading as a background bed. Narrated by Mischievous River for KacheliTV.