The Hundred Tales [antikvár]

Some thirty-odd years ago, I was studying Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles in the Anderson Room of the new University Library at Cambridge. My astonishment at an uncut copy was as great as my surprise at the absence of a translation. For here was a major monu- ment in French literature of the fifteenth century, a work essential for any study of the development of fiction, and a seminal source of plots for later novelists and dramatists. More recently the need for an acces- sible version was impressed on me when giving some graduate courses at the University of North Carolina. This present book is not, however, primarily addressed to students. Like Boccaccio's Decameron, the universality of The Hundred Tales attracts everyone who enjoys a good story told with amazing skill and animation and a terse brilliance of construction. The gay, exciting times of fifteenth-century Burgundy spring to life. Here the life of town and court, of noble, priest, and burgher is dramatically pre- sented with a naturalism that makes a fitting backdrop to some of the greatest stories ever conceived. Far from being a museum or period piece, The Hundred Tales establishes the tradition of short stories which extends through Balzac, Anatole France, Guy de Maupassant, and Colette to the present day. In this translation I have striven to be faithful to the Old French of the manuscript, yet recreate in terms of the twentieth century the spirit of the original—a highly literate and sophisticated narration. These are the stories of urbane men of letters and knowledgeable men of the world, relaxing in the company of close friends, equally at home in polished phrases and in colloquial idioms. Five hundred years after its compilation, The Hundred Tales is now given to readers in the United States and the British Common- wealth. Ten stories appeared in abbreviated form in The Deceyte of Women (ca, 1560), the first collection of Renaissance novelle to be published in English. A version by Robert Bruce Douglas, produced in Paris in 1889 and reprinted in 1924 by Arthur Machen, has little value: it is based not on the manuscript but on the inferior printed text, is cut almost a quarter of the original length, and is full of serious errors in translation.