Few years after the inclusion of the
Decameron
on the banned books’ list, Francisco Truchado from Baeza offers the translation
of another short stories collection that follows Boccaccio’s example: Le
piacevoli notti by Straparola. In a
period characterized by a strict censorship on books containing references to
the magic and erotic sphere, the Honesto entretenimiento seems to elude the Holy Inquisition
controls. This is mainly due to the translator’s strategies. As a matter of
fact, Truchado seems to defy the ecclesiastical court by carefully selecting
short stories –including one of Doni – in which any objectionable material
appears to be either hidden or modified with new textual inputs. Moreover, he
conceals the malice of the stories’ conclusive riddles behind allusive semantic
ambiguities. The editorial success of this translation – published in eight editions
between the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Century – seems to confirm Truchado’s
triumph, as well as representing, among the European translations, the closest
one to Le piacevoli notti’s full
adaptation. A thematic connection with La lozana andaluza, in addition to examples of intertextuality
with the Guzmán de Alfarache and the Patrañuelo, as well as a reference to the loss of
Sancho’s donkey in the Quijote, make
this text essential for the study of the Italian short novel in Renaissance and
Golden Age Spanish Literature.
Marco Federici è professore a contratto e titolare di un assegno di ricerca in Letteratura Spagnola all’Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”. Attualmente sta ultimando l’edizione dell’opera di Pedro de Salazar, Historia de la guerra y presa de Africa (Napoli, Mattia Cancer, 1552). Ha conseguito il titolo di Dottore di Ricerca a la Sapienza Università di Roma, con una tesi sulla traduzione castigliana de Le piacevoli notti di Straparola. Autore di vari articoli per alcune importanti riviste di ispanistica italiane e straniere, si è occupato anche di letteratura contemporanea: in ambito peninsulare della poetessa Francisca Aguirre, e in ambito sudamericano di El hablador di Mario Vargas Llosa.
Dr. Marco Federici is an Adjunct Professor and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Spanish Literature at the L’Orientale University in Naples, Italy. He is currently finishing Pedro de Salazar’s edition titled Historia de la guerra y presa de Africa (Naples, Mattia Cancer, 1552). He obtained a PhD in Romance Philology at the La Sapienza University in Rome, where he worked on a dissertation regarding the Castilian translation of Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti. Being the author of numerous articles for important Italian and international Hispanic Studies journals, Dr. Marco Federici’s research interests also focused on Spanish and Latin American contemporary literatures, namely the poet Francisca Aguirre, and El hablador by Mario Vargas Llosa.