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If you have read An Italian Portrait Gallery, here on Elfinspell, you may recognize the name of Poggio Bracciolini. He was a top writer in the Renaissance, famous throughout Europe in the dawning of the new age of humanism. He was one of the few scholars of his day who proved he wasn't always high-toned and serious and that he could sit back and relax from all that serious writing and write down some pure fluff to amuse himself and anybody else who enjoyed a little comic relief. It goes to show that even the Pope’s staff had to laugh now and then at the end of a hard day excommunicating kings and selling off bits and pieces of skeletons to the tourists to Rome. (They didn’t think of selling T-shirts back then). If you use the site search engine, you can find a little more about some of the names that are dropped throughout these little stories and jests on elfinspell. Of course going to a good web-wide search engine will find a lot more. But these jokes are funny or interesting, sometimes both, all by themselves. Edward Storer, the translator, also wrote Peter the Cruel, a history of a Medieval Spanish King, which is also on this site. With this collection, you will find yourself finding about 1 in 4 stories that you will think is funny. Not bad considering the multi-century generation gap. There is also the translator generation gap that affects the impression. Remember these Edwardian translators were crippled by Victorian mentality and telling anything that somebody back then might think was a little bawdy made them break out in hives. So re-translate the jokes in your mind to something Jay Leno might repeat and you will have an easier time laughing. Everybody in Europe thought these were funny back then, it was an international best-seller, so help Storer out by providing the words that he couldn't say to make these stories excellent. For more on the perils of literature in translation go here. And here. You will also have a great introduction to what your basic Renaissance guy thought was pretty funny. The Liar’s Gallery sounds like it was the Renaissance equivalent of today’s midnight talk show full of scathing satire, purely funny modern tales and parody of current life and politics of the times. There are some great stories with both stinging and poignant messages for us today. And a few chuckles, titters, groans and guffaws. Here you go: The Facetiæ of Poggio and Other Medieval Story-tellers, translated by Edward Storer. Or go straight to the good stuff first: The Jokes first And come back later to: E. Storer’s Introduction, the translator and editor, with the usual details of the authors and the value of this book. I am imagining your smiles from here (with a few puzzled scratches of your head in between). Oh, I almost forgot, I am as sure as I can be that this text is in the public domain but there is a question. I have contacted the publishers that bought the firm that printed this book, and they have no records pertaining to the text in their data base. They assume, as I am doing, that it was simultaneously published in the US and in England (as stated on the title page which does make it in the public domain) because there appears to be only one edition of the book. This is an assumption, though, and if anybody knows anything to the contrary, please let me know and I will then grovel and beg you for permission to use this--or take it down. Because they couldn't find it, they could get not give or withhold permission from their end. There is no information to be had on Mr. Storer on the web, to try to trace his heirs, and I have looked. I am not even certain where he lived. Nor can a few research librarians stateside discover anything more than the date of his life and death and a few other of his texts. Which reminds me, we know a lot about scholars from 400 BC, and their translators, it seems shameful that we care nothing about far too many of those that worked in the last 2 centuries. Paolo and Poggio would be appalled! |
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Susan |
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