Boccaccio’s Decameron in Greek

A brief historical overview from a Translation Agency perspective

Abstract

The article offers a brief historical overview of Boccaccio’s Decameron in Greek since the 16th century, focusing on the notion of Translation Agency. Intending to highlight the importance of this notion, I shall refer to key concepts, mainly Bourdieu’s habitus/capital and Simeoni’s translatorial habitus, while offering information on two Decameron translators. Based on their socio-cultural background, I shall attempt to demonstrate how the Greek translators’ habitus influenced the way they translated Boccaccio (translation for the sake of this article, covers also adaptation). The above-mentioned claim will be further corroborated and verified by means of limited, selected textual analysis from the Greek translations of Tale VII/7 of the Decameron, from the 16th and the 20th centuries, by I. Trivólis and K. Politis, respectively.